


dark underground//violent sky

by bereft_of_frogs



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: (or limited comfort), Adoption, Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, At least he's trying, Complicated Relationships, Family Drama, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Murder, Mystery, Nightmares, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Rape/Non-con Elements, Recreational Drug Use, Serial Killers, Sexual Violence, Suicidal Thoughts, Thor (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Torture, Unreliable Narrator, explicit discussion of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 14:35:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18875164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bereft_of_frogs/pseuds/bereft_of_frogs
Summary: (not quite an) All-Human AUThe moment Loki Odinson turns eighteen, he runs. He moves to the city, gets a terrible job and a worse apartment. He ignores all attempts by his mother and brother to contact him. (His father doesn’t even try.) But then, a year later, he begins to hear something. Something coming from the empty apartment next door.All is not what it seems. This is not the story you think it is.





	1. dark underground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The moment Loki Odinsson turns eighteen, he runs. He moves to the city, gets a terrible job and a worse apartment. He ignores all attempts by his mother and brother to contact him. (His father doesn’t even try.) But then, a year later, he begins to hear something. Something coming from the empty apartment next door. 
> 
> All is not what it seems. This is not the story you think it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dark underground warnings: drug use, mental health issues, murder, graphic violence. very explicit discussion of suicide, including past attempts, affects on family members, and suicidal ideation. 
> 
> Please note the 'unreliable narrator' tag - any opinion expressed in this piece is not necessarily shared by the author.

Loki blinks into awareness. From the pulsing music, colored lights, and the dress of those that bump against him, he’s in the hallway of a club, leaning against the wall opposite the bathrooms. He doesn’t remember how he got there. He doesn’t know anything. Only that his head is swimming and he has an urgent need to vomit.

He staggers into the men’s room, just in time. He’s horribly dizzy. The room spins and blurs before his eyes. He presses a hand to the side of his head where it pulses in pain, groaning. When the heaves slow, he shakily gets to his feet and stumbles out of the stall. He rinses his mouth out with water from the sink.

“Rough night?” Someone says from behind him.

He blinks up at the blond man leaning against the bathroom wall, trying to remember if he knew him. “Don’t remember.”

“Ha, we’ve all been there. I got the stuff you wanted.” Did he want something? Loki doesn’t remember that either. The other man holds out a bottle of Vicodin, with a woman’s name on it. Doris Edelmann. Loki takes it. A vague memory is stirring. _Insurance policy_ , he thinks. _That’s what this is, insurance. But for what?_ A shiver travels up his spine, then a calm in its wake. “My cousin snagged it - get this - from a house they were cleaning out for an estate sale. The lady’s dead, so it’s not like she’s going to need these anymore. Bit creepy though, taking a dead woman’s meds to get high.”

Loki blinks. “Right. Do I…do I owe you?”

“Naw, you paid in advance. Shit, you’re pretty fucked up, you don’t remember that?”

He sways on his feet, heart pounding in his chest. His mouth fills with saliva, a promise of continued sickness.

“I should go.” He pushes past him, back into the club.

“What, no thank you? Whatever, jeez man, no one has any manners anymore…”

He swims through the crowd, jostled by the dancing, and then he’s out, into the cool early fall air. It takes him a minute to get his bearings once he’s outside, but he recognizes the cross street. He’s only about ten minutes away from home. He wraps his arms around his cramping stomach, draws his hood up over his head, and stumbles down the sidewalk.

It takes twice as long as usual, he has to keep pausing to swallow down nausea, but he makes it back to his apartment building and trudges up the stairs. The door to the apartment next to his is ajar.

He cocks his head at it. He remembers something. The occupants had moved out three days ago. A couple. They’d had a messy breakup, he remembers…screaming. Lots of curse words. He hadn’t been terribly sad to see them go. The girl always gave of the distinct impression that she disliked him, even though their only interactions were bumping into each other at the mailboxes. She had long black hair, and the last time he had seen her, she had shorn it all off.

No one should be in there. The landlord told him he wasn’t going to rent it, not until he replaced the cracked tiles in the bathroom. Should take another couple of weeks, he’d said.

Loki’s head pulses in pain and his stomach flips, but he moves towards the door.

“Hello?” He calls out, pushing the door open wider. The apartment is dark. “Hello?” He flicks the light on.

The studio apartment is empty, cleaned out. Nothing and no one there.

The cleaners must have forgotten to shut the door properly. A draft must have pushed the door ajar.

The nausea swells, sending Loki stumbling back out. He kills the light and slams the door shut, staggering to his own apartment. His hands shake so badly he almost can’t get his keys in the lock. But then he’s in, stumbling to his knees in front of the toilet.

It takes a long time for the heaves to slow, but they finally do. He guzzles down water until his tongue no longer feels coated in muck. Then he fills the glass again and sits in bed, the stolen bottle of Vicodin in his hands, and tries to remember what happened that day.

He had seen Thor. _That_ is what had happened. For the first time in nearly a month, he had seen his brother.

It had been in the grocery store. Loki was debating if he had enough left over in his paycheck to buy the good coffee, or if he should just stick to the cheap stuff. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw him.

Thor was with his girlfriend. They were looking at plums. His heart had skipped a beat and he’d tried to duck away, but it had been too late.

“Loki!” He ducked into the frozen food aisle, but Thor had followed.

“Leave me alone!”

“Loki, be reasonable! I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I don’t need you, you… _checking_ _up_ on me!”

“I was not checking up on you, it’s a damn coincidence. Loki, we live in the same city, it’s going to happen. And I deserve-”

“Oh, you _deserve_ , let’s talk more about what you deserve and what I’m left with.” They had kept their argument in hushed tones, surrounded by bags of frozen peas and cartons of ice cream. They had been well trained by their parents in the art of having quiet, dignified fights in public spaces.

Loki thinks that thought alone should have made him scream and throw things. Make it public and messy like they always hated. But then again, a little twinge of guilt plagues him. Did Thor really deserve that? He was just the one…what had he done?

Sitting on his bed, in his small and sparse studio apartment, he shakes his head to clear it. The headache pulses.

“He found me…didn’t Father? No. It was Thor.” The memories come back now, just flashes. Thor shaking him, Thor shouting, _what have you done? Loki, what did you take, what have you **done?**_

So he had seen Thor in the supermarket, and they had a quiet fight in the frozen food aisle, the chill from the freezers biting at his skin. The rest of the day is a blur. He doesn’t remember buying the Vicodin, or how he got to the club at all.

Loki stops trying to remember. He just sighs and pops open the bottle, shaking out three little white pills. He downs them with a gulp of water and sits back, closing his eyes and waiting for them to take effect. Drowsiness weighs down on him, making his body feel so, so heavy and warm.

Next to his head, on the wall, something starts scratching.

It sounds like fingernails, or thin claws, scrabbling at the wall. Then a soft thump, and another. A louder thump. A louder one still. He opens his eyes and surges to his feet, the drugs making him dizzy. His vision darkens for a second before clearing. The scratching has resumed.

“Hey!” He pounds twice on the wall. “Cut it out!” There’s a moment of silence and then two pounds on the wall back.

He gasps, staggers away from the wall. Then he laughs at his own foolish fear. “See that it doesn’t continue!” he says to the wall, and he flops back into bed. As he’s falling asleep, coherency returns and he remembers something important.

That’s the wall his apartment shares with the empty one. There should be no one on the other side. He had just checked.

The drugs become too much for consciousness to bear. He passes out, only waking in the bright light of day to the shrieking of his alarm, summoning him to work.

 

“Rough night?” His manager says as he counts the cash in the register.

“Must have been something I ate,” He croaks. “I was up half the night.”

“You need to take off early?”

“I’ll be fine, just a bit tired now.”

“Uh huh,” He starts making the cold brew. “More bread is being delivered in fifteen. We’re getting a new shipment of beans, I’ll be gone for that but Greg can sign for it. And your brother called again.”

Loki freezes. “Just because you two are friends doesn’t mean-”

“Kid, he’s worried about you. He just wants to know you’re okay.” Loki slams the register shut. “Your sleepless night have anything to do with seeing him yesterday?”

“No.”

“Sure it didn’t,” He says with a small smile. “Just let him talk to you every once in a while. He means well.”

“I will take that under consideration.” Loki holds a cold bottle of water to his throbbing head as they open for the day and the first customers queue up.

 

On the way back home after work, he runs into his landlord changing a lightbulb in the entryway.

“207 is still vacant, right?”

“I’m not showing it yet.” The landlord doesn’t even look down from his place on the ladder.

“Right, but last night I came in and the door was open, so maybe the cleaners…”

“Cleaners finished up last week.”

“…Right. But the door was open and I thought I heard something, so…”

“Workers won’t be in ’til the fourth. No one’s in there, you’re imagining it.”

“Right. Just…I thought I’d let you know.”

“And you did.” Loki knows a dismissal when he hears one, but presses on.

“If it’s not someone in the apartment, maybe there are mice-”

“We don’t have any mice!”

“But the scratching…”

“We had exterminators here last month. No mice, no rats, no bugs, you’re just imagining things.” The landlord finally looks at him with a scowl. “Nothing’s in there.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Loki edges past the ladder and slams the front door a bit on his way into the building.

He takes only one of the Vicodin that night, just enough to take the edge off falling asleep. He didn’t buy them to get high, he bought them for a _reason_ , and that reason would be moot if he wasted all of them. He drifts off to a deep, deep sleep in his apartment, aided by the narcotic. He can feel his breathing and heart rate slow, and a sense of calm wash over him as he’s swallowed by the darkness.

 

Loki gradually blinks his eyes open, flinching at the brightness of the light. He tries to sit up but cannot feel his body. Sensation slowly bleeds back in, starting at his extremities. He’s cold, lying flat on his back. Soft but tight cloth is wrapped around his ankles and wrists. He feels cold metal beneath his hand. He tries to gasp in a shocked breath, but when he does, the feeling of a plastic tube in his throat becomes apparent. The tube is taped to the corner of his mouth and forces air in and out of his lungs at an even pace. Panic seizes him and he tries to struggle. Something saps at his strength and the restraints don’t budge. He is too weak to even turn his head, but without looking he knows where he is. The hospital. The fluorescent lights, the rough, plasticky feeling of the cloth against him, something beeping in the corner, it is obvious.

Two nurses enter his room.

“Prep another dose of sedative, he’s awake again.” Loki moans, pulling at the restraints. “We need to keep him calm, he’ll injure himself like this.” _Talk to me!_ He wants to shriek, but the tube in his mouth is as efficient as a gag. _What happened, how did I get here? TALK TO ME!_

“Want to give me report while we’re in here?” The female nurse asks. Loki watches the male nurse draw liquid into a syringe.

“Standard OD. Probably a suicide attempt, based on the medical history.” _No_ , Loki thinks. _I only took one, just to help me sleep! I didn’t mean to this time, I just took one._

Didn’t he? What about the blackouts? Could he have woken, taken more, and forgotten? He had to admit, it was theoretically possible. He tugs fruitlessly on the restraints. “This is the third time, brother found him again. Went into arrest twice on the way here.”

“Psych’s been called?”

“We’re just waiting for him to be medically stable, then they’ll take him.”

Loki jerks at the restraints. _No! I won’t go back_. He can’t go away again, can’t be locked in that place where the other patients scream constantly and he never gets any sleep, where the doctors and counsellors and nurses poke and prod at him, and treat him like dirt under their feet. The worst is when they shut him away, alone, in that tiny, dull room. Perfectly soundproofed, it is deadly silent and bright. He couldn’t do it again, he couldn’t be alone like that again.

“He’s going to be in it for the long haul, if this is the third attempt.”

“Mmhm. He’s going away for a long time. Family says they’re done too, so it’s not like he’ll have anyone to be discharged to.” _Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP_. Tears sting his eyes as he tries to make a sound around the tube and only manages a pathetic gurgle. _Please_. The injection is ready, and though he jerks away and tries to get away, the male nurse inserts it into his IV and pushes the plunger down. Loki watches as the liquid travels down the tube and into the veins of his arm.

It takes but a minute for it to take effect, slowing down his racing thoughts and taking the will to fight out of him. His breath slows back to the forced rhythm through the tube and his hands fall limply back to the mattress. The male nurse leaves, but the woman remains. She leans down, her lips brushing against his ear.

“You’re alone now,” She whispers. “You can never go home.”

 Loki wakes with a shuddering gasp, shaking like a leaf.

It takes a moment to remember where he is. He is in his own bed, in his own apartment. His hand shakes as he turns on the light. Nothing is amiss. The bottle of Vicodin is still nearly full, sitting sealed on his bedside table. He takes a shaky breath and then laughs.

“A dream,” He whispers to himself. “Just a dream.” His heart still flutters and he feels jittery, restless. He closes his eyes and leans against the wall, trying to calm his nerves. “Just a dream.”

Right against his head, on the wall, a sound like nails dragging down the wall. He opens his eyes and sits up. When he does, the scratching grows more frantic, scrabbling at the wall.

“Hello?” He calls out. No answer. Just the scratching. Like the night before, he knocks three times on the wall. Three knocks answer, and then the scratching starts up again. He presses his ear to the wall. There’s a thump, and a drag, like the sound of furniture moving. He gets out his phone and texts the landlord.

_Hey - I’m hearing things from 207 again._

_No1 in there. Apt empty. Hearing things._

“I am _not_ hearing things,” He whispers to himself. The landlord texts again.

_Busy. Don’t bother me until morning._ Loki rolls his eyes. He keeps the light on, but lies down on his side, facing the wall, and tries to go to sleep.

The scratching continues. He puts a pillow over his head and groans.

There’s an answering moan.

He sits up again, heart beating fast.

“Hello?” There’s a low moan again. It’s unmistakably human. He sits for a long time, frozen. The scratching does not stop, now punctuated by periodic moaning. “Fuck it,” He whispers. If the landlord isn’t going to do anything about this, he’ll call someone who can. His pulse flutters, heartbeat thundering in his ears, as he dials on his cell phone.

“911, what is the location of your emergency?” He stutters through his address.

“The apartment next to mine…I think someone’s broken in there. There’s this sound, scratching and things…moving? No one’s supposed to be there, they moved out days ago. I tried to contact the landlord, but he won’t come.” The operator promises to send someone to check it out, in a tone of voice that suggests it’s not their top priority. Frustrated, Loki sets his phone aside and turns out the light. He curls on his side and tries to go to sleep.

That sound again.

Scratching, first slow, then quickening in pace. Another thump. Then he hears a low moan, another clearly human moan.

He sits up in bed, turning the light back on. The scratching doesn’t stop this time. There’s no way the police will actually send someone to this neighborhood before morning. He pulls on a sweater and his boots.

The lights are yellowed and dim in the hallway. He knocks on the neighboring door. Then louder.

“Hello!” He calls. Nothing. He presses his ear to the wood. He can hear the scratching, then that low moan again. His heart is thundering. His credit card may no longer be good for funds, but it at least will work for this.

The door swings open and the scratching stops.

“Hello?” He calls. “Does someone need help in here? Hello?” He inches into the apartment. It’s illuminated by the dingy glow from the streetlight outside. “Hello?” There is silence now. “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to make sure you’re alright. I called the police, they’re on their way.” The studio apartment is a mirror of his own. A narrow hallway, with the closet and bathroom doors, opening out into an empty room. There is no one there.

Loki sighs and turns on the light. He goes to the wall shared with his and there is no evidence of scratch marks or of anyone being there at all. He runs his hand down the wall, crouching down to the baseboard. Smooth. He didn’t think the walls were thick enough for creatures to crawl in, but that must be what it is.

But then why did the scratching sometimes stop? What of the moan?

A chill runs down his spine. He straightens up and backs away from the wall. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something on the windowsill. He goes to the window and picks it up. It’s a photograph, of a man holding an infant, apparently in a hospital. The man in the photo, tall, with dark hair, icy blue eyes, and a thick beard, is looking up at the photographer. His eyes are dead. The expression on his face is pure _hatred_.

“What the hell?” But before he can contemplate further, there are footsteps on the stairs. Loki scrambles to stuff the photograph in his pocket and get out of the apartment. He’s too slow and as he turns to hurry down the hall, he finds himself facing the barrel of a gun.

“Hands in the air!” The officer shouts. “Now! Hands up! On your knees!”

He puts his hands on the back of his head. “I was the one who called!” Loki cries. “I am not breaking in, I was just checking-”

“Get on the floor! Now!” He complies, lying facedown on the floor. The officer cuffs his hands behind his back.

“I was-”

“Yeah, yeah, you were breaking in to find shit to sell for drugs, weren’t you?”

“I am _not_ a _junkie_ -”

The officer searches his pockets, and finds the photograph and the credit card, handing them to his partner. “You got some ID?”

He sighs. “I live next door, 209, my ID is in my wallet on the dresser. I swear, I wasn’t going to steal anything, not that there’s anything in here to steal.”

“Yeah, whatever.” They drag him out of the building, shut him in the back of their car and leave him alone.

“ _Shit_. Shit, shit, shit,” He hisses, trying to shift the pressure from his bound wrists. “You should have just _fucking_ stayed in bed, you _fool_.” He closes his eyes and tries to calm himself down. “It’s fine, they’ll find your ID, and let you go.” Then he remembers the Vicodin. “ _Shit_.” Sure enough, the officers return carrying his wallet - and the stolen bottle of pills. “You seem to have a lot of names, _Loki_.” The one who had cuffed him says. “Or should I say _Doris Edelmann_.”

“Yo, so I do have a record for a Loki Odinson, disturbing the peace and some minor drug possession charges from about three years ago. Got nothing on any Loki Laufeyson.”

“Laufeyson?” Loki says, surprised. “What? Of course not, that’s not my name. You have my ID, the credit card is mine, you can clearly see-”

“What about the picture?”

This brings him up short. “The picture?”

“Yeah,” The officer shows him the photograph. The man, his hateful stare and dead eyes. Then the officer flips it and shows him. Inscribed on the back in shaky handwriting, is the name _Loki Laufeyson_.

 

The fluorescent lights bear down on him. He sits, hunched over his knees in the holding cell, bouncing his leg up and down. He’d buried his head in his hands as soon as they locked him in here, and did not surface until someone taps on the bars.

“Odinson,” The duty lieutenant says. He lifts his head. “Your brother’s here to pick you up.”

“ _Damn it_.”

Thor is standing at the front desk, signing paperwork. He looks exhausted and none too happy. His hair is pulled into a loose bun and his clothes are disheveled. His frown deepens when he catches sight of Loki.

“You got off lucky this time,” The officer who arrested him says bitterly.

“They’re not pressing charges,” Thor says. “And you’re free to go.”

“Fine,” He says, snatching up the clear bag with his belongings. “Can we go?” Thor studies him for a moment, then nods. They emerge into cool night.

“You don’t have a jacket?”

“They didn’t exactly stop to let me get dressed before handcuffing me and throwing me in the back of a police car.” Loki tries to get his bearings, checking for street signs.

“I drove,” Thor says from behind him. “I’ll drive you home.”

“It’s fine,” Loki says. “Just point me in the right direction and I’ll be on my way.”

“Loki, _stop_.” Thor grabs his arm. “I am taking you home and that’s final. Do you have any idea how scared I was? When I was woken _in the middle of the night_ by a call from the police? I thought you were _dead_.”

“What do you care?” Loki snarls, gratified by the stung look on his brother’s face.

“Get in the car,” Thor says, low and authoritative. It doesn’t seem likely that Thor will tell him where he is and he doesn’t feel up to wandering the streets searching for his apartment. So he concedes and gets in the passenger side of his brother’s car. “You’re lucky my number’s still on your paperwork, or you’d be stuck there overnight. I told them that you didn’t mean any harm, and that the Vicodin was a mistake. What were you doing in there, anyways?”

“It’s nothing.” He leans his head against the window. “I heard a sound.”

“And that’s why you called 911?” Loki sits up in surprise. Thor glances at him, then back to the road. “That’s what convinced them. I was there when they talked to the 911 operator. She said you sounded spooked.” Spooked. What a word for it.

“I’ve been hearing this sound, scratching. For days. Today it…I thought I heard a voice…But when I checked the apartment, there was no one there.”

Thor’s brow furrows. “Have you been taking your meds?”

“ _Thor!_ ” He crosses his arms. “ _Yes_ , I have been taking my medication,” He says bitterly. “And I am not hallucinating! I am not… _hearing_ things!”

“Loki, calm down! I have to ask, you know I have to ask. The cops said there was no one there and security camera footage from the hallway doesn’t show anyone coming in or out all night. Don’t you think there’s a _possibility_ -”

“Fuck you, Thor! I am _not_ hearing things! Or seeing things, or whatever you think-” He must admit, if only to himself, that there is something odd going on. There’s the picture, of course. The photograph he can just see the edge of in the bag. With his first name written on it. There are the blackouts.

“I think it would make sense to call the doctor-”

“No! I don’t need to…you just want me locked up again, where you can watch me, where you can be sure I’m not doing anything _the family_ would find _unsatisfactory_. Fuck you, I am not going back to that place.” Thor pulls up to the front of Loki’s building. Loki wrenches the door open and bolts out of the car without a backwards glance.

“Hey! Wait!” Thor follows him and catches his arm.

“Let me _go!_ ”

“No. Loki, you have to listen to me, I’m trying to help you. I don’t want you to get locked up again, I just bailed you out of _jail_ for God’s sake! Listen. I don’t want you back in that place, I swear. I just want you to be safe.”

“I’m safe when you _leave me alone!_ ”

“You’re not. Loki,” Thor sounds intensely sad. He glances up at the building. “I’m scared for you, being alone here.”

“Tonight was a mistake. I should have…minded my own business. And the Vicodin. I swear, I haven’t taken any.” _Tonight at least_ , he thought. Thor’s grip is still tight on his arms. “Thor. I’m fine. I take my medication. I go to work. I go to therapy.” _Most of the time_. “It’s fine. It’s late, Thor, I just want to go to sleep.”

Thor glances up at the apartment. “Will you call me in the morning?”

“Yes. Are you going to tell Mother?”

Thor sighs. “I won’t. I don’t want to worry her. But if you don’t call me in the morning…”

“I swear, I will.”

“Okay.” Thor reluctantly leaves him to dig his keys out of the clear belongings bag and go back to his apartment.

He has to pass the other on his way back. There’s a piece of police tape across the door, like a little red ‘stay the fuck away, Loki’ sign.

Before he goes to bed, he takes out the photograph. The man’s hateful glare at the camera sends a shiver up his spine. He turns it over, hoping he was imagining the name on the back, but sure enough, there it is.

His own given name. And it’s not like it’s common enough to be a coincidence. He sets the photograph on the windowsill and lays down and falls asleep. There is only silence. No scratching can be heard.

 

The chairs are set up in a semi circle in the church basement. They’re half full, and more people trickle in. There’s a slender brown haired man who studies the tile pattern very intently. A tired looking young woman in a black sweater. A blonde woman who has clearly been crying, the mascara smeared around her eyes. A middle aged mom playing a game on her phone. A black man tapping his foot and looking very nervous. An old woman in a cat sweater. Among others.  
Thor sits beside the brown haired man.

“Okay, welcome. For those of you who don’t know, I’m Harry.” Harry is a balding man in a shirt and tie. He has a name tag that reads ‘Harry - Facilitator’ pinned to the pocket of his shirt. He rolls up his sleeves and leans forward, like he’s trying to prove to them that he’s ‘chill,’ relaxed. Just one of them. The ‘cool counselor’ look. “I’m very glad to see such a great turnout tonight.” That receives stunned silence back and he clears his throat. “So. Welcome to Suicide Loss Support group. I think we should briefly introduce ourselves, we have a couple newcomers this week. Annabel? Will you start us off?”

“Certainly,” the old woman says. “I’m Annabel. Husband. Completed.”

The crying woman, seated next to her, cocks her head. “Completed?”

“We have a wide range of experiences represented here,” Harry starts.

“This group is for both people grieving their loved ones who _successfully_ committed suicide,” The girl in the black sweater says. “Sorry. _Completed_ suicide. Not supposed to use words like ‘successful.’” She sounds bitter. “And ‘committed’ is too judgmental. We had a big fight over it when the group first started up - Mr. Facilitator at the time wanted us just to use ‘died’ and ‘survived’ but people didn’t like how it reminded them who was alive and who was dead. Mr. Facilitator - Jesus, can’t remember his name - got all pissed when we decided on the whole ‘completed’ thing. But we stuck with it. ‘Completed’ for those who are mourning a loss. And ‘Incomplete’ for those that are working to support family members who survived. ‘Cuz the city doesn’t have enough funding for two groups or something. That’s how we introduce ourselves here. Name. Relation. Which one. I’m Sara. Girlfriend. Complete.”

“Okay, Sara, thanks for the history lesson. They still want us to periodically _revisit_ the language we use - because language matters, people - but as we’ve so far all agreed on these terms we will stick with them for now.”

“Oh,” The crying girl says. “Okay. Dana. Fiancé. Complete.”

“Jo-Ann,” The middle aged woman puts away her phone. “Son. Incomplete.” And so around it goes. Most are ‘complete.’

“Thor. Brother. Incomplete.”

“Jake. Sister and Brother. Complete and incomplete.” He looks very, very tired, and very, very sad. “They’re…they were twins. One…survived. One…” He trails off. And with that they’ve completed the circle.

“Excellent,” Harry claps his hands together. “Now that we’ve all been introduced, who has something to share?”

“I’ll start then,” Sara says. “So, I was talking to my coworker, none of them can look me in the fucking eye anymore…”

“…it’s been like three days,” Devon cries into her tissue. “They said…they said I should find others, that I would feel less alone but I don’t know if it’s going to work. I feel so alone. Why? Why would he do this to me?…

“…big milestone this week. I got on the subway by myself. It took me a while to actually get on the train. Just stood on the platform for a while, thinking about him standing there, what he saw at the end. But I didn’t freak out, just got on the train. Was 20 minutes late for work, my boss was pissed but when I told him why…”

“…she gets out in three days and I’m freaking out. Our parents want to take her home, like _home_ home, but I don’t know about her going all the way back to the country like this…”

“…it’s been 5 years since my Victor decided to end his life. I’m finding myself blaming him less and less. And I’m not so lonely. There’s a lovely young woman living next to me who’s studying to be a concert pianist, she comes by with cookies and I feel less alone…”

“…he says he’s ready to go back to school, but I’m not sure, kids can be so cruel…”

“My brother was arrested last night,” Thor says, looking at his hands. “It was one of those awful moments, the ones you dream about. I was asleep and my phone starts ringing. My heart just _sank_. And then I answered it and it was a police officer asking ‘is there a Mr. Thor Odinson there?’ and then she said ‘it’s about your brother’ and I just thought…” There are tears brimming in his eyes. “But then, she told me he had been arrested,” Thor laughs. “For breaking into an abandoned apartment next to his, and I had to come pick him up from the station and I just thought _thank fucking God_.

“And then when I got there and saw him in that cell, I was so pissed - relieved, so relieved I thought I would collapse. But pissed. Then he was being such an ass. He has no idea, and he doesn’t even try to understand, how awful this has been for me. How fucking scared I am, when the phone rings unexpectedly, or I hear on the news about a body being found in the river.” Thor runs a hand through his hair. His expression goes still, flat. “You know, sometimes I wish I hadn’t found him at all. I wish that he had died, that I could come here and say ‘Thor. Brother. Complete.’” The others have no reaction at all to these words. You could hear a pin drop in the dead silence. “I wish I had been a couple minutes later. I could have found him _dead_ , instead of _dying_. I wouldn’t have had to call 911, wouldn’t have had to stay in the hospital for 72 hours, sleeping on chairs in the waiting room, wouldn’t have to be constantly worrying, jumping at every shadow and ring of my phone. I could be mourning. I could have been left with good memories, instead of having to deal with my asshole little brother, who steals medication and needs constant monitoring and is _ungrateful_ -”

Loki opens his eyes, gasping for breath. His heart beats fast in his chest. He sits up gingerly, checking the time. Almost 9:30. Light is streaming in through his windows.

He has a text from Thor.

_Call me when you’re up_. He flops back down to the thin mattress with a moan. The dream had seemed so real.

These nightmares were getting worse.

He waits until he’s had coffee and a bit of toast to call his brother. Thor picks up on the second ring.

“Hey,” Loki says, leaning against the window frame and looking out at the street. Someone is walking their dog, the hood of their rain jacket pulled up against the raw day. “You told me to call.” His voice is flat, and of course, Thor picks up on it.

“Are you alright?”

“Just tired. It was a late night. Thor, I…” He thinks about the dream, the way that Thor in the dream spat the word ‘ungrateful’. “Thanks. For last night. You saved my ass.”

“Of course, Loki. You can call me for _anything_. I _want_ you to call me,” He sounds almost desperate on the other end of the call. “Are you working today?”

“Yeah, eleven to seven.”

“Do you want me to come by?”

“No, no it’s fine. Don’t you have…finals or something?”

“Next week.” Thor pauses. “Listen, I have to get to class, but are you sure you’re alright? You sound…”

“Yeah, I’m _fine_. It’s just…it’s just that I’m tired.”

Thor hums. “And you’re taking-”

“Yes, Thor, I’m taking my medication.” He technically hadn’t yet, but he would.

“Okay. Seriously, Loki, call me if you need anything today.”

“I don’t need anything, Thor. I’m fine.” Maybe if he says it enough he’ll start to believe it. He hangs up and, as promised, takes his meds. He changes for work and grabs his keys off his bedside table.

The photograph has been propped up against the lamp. He doesn’t remember doing that. Didn’t he leave it on the windowsill? He looks at the hateful glare of the man in the photo, then flips it facedown.

 

After work, he eats a late dinner and pushes the furniture of his room around, so his bed is on the opposite wall from _that_ apartment. He hasn’t heard any scratches, but that doesn’t mean they won’t start back up again.

He falls asleep early, after the long day on his feet and busy night.

He wakes, blinking open his eyes to see the ceiling he spent many a night staring at as a troubled teenager. There’s a crack in the plaster that curves in the distinct shape of a wave, as familiar to him as the back of his hand.

Loki sits up gingerly, facing his room. Everything is as he left it, the moment he fled when he was eighteen. Could they have kept this all so pristine in the last year? He moves to stand, to go downstairs and see who was here - ask _how_ he got here, but when he does, he catches sight of his hands.

They’re covered with blood.

Breath coming hard, he pats his own body, seeking a source for the bleeding, but finds nothing. It’s not his.

There’s a knife on the bed, turning his white comforter brown as the blood congeals and dries.

“What…” He staggers back. “What the fuck?” His palm leaves a smear of blood on the door as he wrenches it open and half falls down the stairs. “Hello? Is anyone there? Mother? Thor?” He hears water flowing in the kitchen, that solid white noise of water running from the faucet into the bowl of the sink, the sound he once expected to be the last thing he ever heard. “Hello?” He pushes through the swinging door to find a room in chaos.

The kitchen table is on its side, food splattered across the wall and floor. The remnants of cooking lie over the counter. Scattered throughout the room are utensils, from the drawers that hang open and askew from their moorings.

A thick, deep pool of blood slowly seeps over the black and white tile. It is such a deep red it is almost black. Three corpses lie in a row, cold and stiff and already turning a mottled shade of purple. The cuts to their throats are deep and ragged.

His mother. His father. Thor. Dead. Apparently at his hand.

He falls to his knees.

“No, I…” He cries. “I didn’t mean…I didn’t mean for you to die. I didn’t mean…” He crawls forward until he is in the pool of blood, feeling it soak into his knees. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t _really_ mean it, I never…” His breath hitches. The corpses on the floor have nothing to say to him. “Please.” His hand brushes just the edge of his father’s sleeve.

Odin lunges for his neck, eye opening to milky blue and clouded, his hand is like ice as it wraps around his throat, his face twisted in hate-

 Loki sits bolt upright in bed, panting and grasping his throat. For a moment, he’s confused. Something is _off_ about his apartment, even more off than the horrible vision of his childhood home his mind had conjured. Slowly, what’s odd about the room dawns on him.

Every light in his apartment is on. Every one. Even the ones whose switches are clear across the room. The fluorescents overhead hum.

“What the-” Before the words are out of his mouth, the room is plunged into total darkness. He scrambles back on his bed until he hits the wall. His heartbeat is loud in his ears. He hears the scratching start. It’s louder than ever, if he can hear it this clearly from all the way across the room. Then the low moans. He’s paralyzed with terror.

All is silent for a moment. And then there is a shriek, an animalistic scream of pain and panic. Every light flickers on and off as the screaming crescendos, accompanied by thundering booms.

And as quickly as it began, it stops. Dead silence, then his bedside lamp flickering on, the illumination steadying. The apartment is as quiet and peaceful as it had been when he went to bed.

Loki sits frozen on the mattress, hands pressed over his mouth. Wretched, frightened sobs threaten to overtake him. He looks at the bedside table and the photograph has been propped against the lamp again. The man’s stare bores through him, not unlike how Odin in the dream had looked at him. His mouth has gone bone dry. His phone sits next to the photograph.

He’s shaking uncontrollably as he crawls forward. He snatches up the phone then retreats to his position on the center of the mattress. His hands shake almost too badly to work the buttons.

“Loki? Loki, what’s wrong?”

“Thor, something’s happened,” He sobs. “Something…at my apartment. I can’t stay here, I need you to come get me.”

“What _happened?_ ”

“Please just come get me.”

“Okay, okay, I’m on my way,” There’s rustling sounds on the other end. “Loki, just stay on the phone, stay calm. Have you hurt yourself?”

Loki groans. “I haven’t hurt myself, and I’m _not_ going to kill myself!” He cries. “Please, just come, I can’t stay here anymore.”

“I’m coming, Loki, but you need to tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’ll explain when you get here.”

“Loki, do not hang up, do _not_ -”

He flips the phone shut. A bit calmer, he manages to get himself dressed, pull on boots and a sweatshirt. Still trembling, he rushes out of his apartment without looking back.

He waits on the curb, pacing back and forth, and hugging his chest. A few minutes after making it to the sidewalk, he realizes he’s forgotten his wallet, his phone, and all his medication in his haste.

“Shit,” He mutters, looking up at his window. “Just go, just go you coward, you need them, you can just go-” But no matter how he tries to push himself, he can’t force himself back in the building.

Quickly enough that he probably ran a few red lights, Thor pulls up to the curb and springs from the car.

“Loki, are you-” Loki cannot help it anymore, throwing himself into Thor’s arms. Thor catches him, squeezing. “Loki, what is it? What happened?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” He sobs. “I can’t stay here, I can’t.” Thor calms him down enough to get the story out of him. Through tears, he manages to tell him about the scratching, the lights. “I know it sounds insane. But I’m not crazy, I’m not!”

“Okay!” Thor says. “It’s okay, you had a nightmare-”

“I didn’t have a nightmare!” Loki yells. “Okay, well, I did, but that was _before_.” He shudders, his vision for a moment filling with the destroyed scene in the kitchen, but when he blinks it’s just Thor’s concerned face hovering above him, illuminated by the glow from the streetlight. “I don’t want to stay here. Can’t we just…”

“Sure,” Thor says quickly. “Sure, let’s just go back to my place, you can rest and we can talk more about it in the morning.”

“There are some things I need. Up there.” He gestures at the apartment windows.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Loki nods frantically. “Okay, let’s go.” The apartment still feels eerie to him, though there is nothing apparently wrong with it. The lights come on when he flips the switch, their glow steady and unassuming. Thor fills his small apartment, a presence larger than the tight space he has made his sanctuary. He shivers and begins to gather up the bottles of medication, searching for his wallet under his bed.

“Which side?” Thor asks. “The scratching?” Loki gestures at the wall.

“That one.” Thor stands in front of the wall, running his hands over it.

“It’s quiet now. Hm.” Thor crosses the small room to his bed, just as Loki finds his wallet. His brother’s eyes alight on the photograph. “What’s this?” His brow furrows as he takes in the image. “Jesus, Loki, where did you find this? Why do you have it-”

“It was in _there_ ,” He says, nodding to the wall. Thor studies it, looking disturbed. “Turn it over.”

Thor complies. His eyes widen in shock. “…this can’t be a coincidence.”

Loki shakes his head. “No,” He says. “It can’t.”

 

Loki wakes the next morning, wrapped in a spare duvet, on Thor’s couch. His brother’s apartment is cluttered, but not as messy as he would have thought. Two others share the space, but Thor assured him they were away for the weekend.

It must be late. They had been up for a while after getting back to Thor’s place, Loki too keyed up and nervous to sleep. They’d watched something stupid on TV until Loki started to drift off, then Thor brought him bedding and an extra pillow and told him he’d leave the lights on in the kitchen and in the bathroom if he needed it.

Loki had jolted awake several times, but each time the soft glow from the kitchen and the deeply familiar scent emanating from his brother’s pillow whispering _safe_ lulls him back to sleep. He does not dream.

“Morning,” Thor says, setting a mug down on the coffee table and sits in the ratty armchair across from the couch.

“Is it still?”

“Nearly eleven, but yes. Don’t worry, I called your boss. Explained that you were really sick and I didn’t know what your schedule was.”

“Thanks. I would have had to be in by noon. Is that…?”

“Coffee? Yes. Thought you could use some.”

“Before we have The Talk, you mean?”

Thor sighs. “Yes, before we talk about what _happened_ last night.” Loki holds the mug between his fingers, feeling the warmth seep into his bones. “And before. Loki…you’re really beginning to scare me.”

“I know. I’m…I’m _sorry_.” He tells Thor everything, going back to the night he blacked out in the club. He leaves out no gory details, concluding with the suspicious photograph with his first name written on it.

“It has to have something to do with my adoption,” Loki says. “Right? It must. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Loki, that doesn’t make _any_ sense.” Thor flips the photograph back over, frowning at the image.

“It’s my name! And it’s not like it’s a common name, it can’t be a coincidence. Thor, what if,” He taps the picture. “What if that’s my name? My _real_ name? What if that’s me?”

Thor’s expression twists. “And what, do you think this is your biological father?”

“Look, even if you think it’s crazy, you can’t deny this is all strange. The dreams, the lights, the sounds. It has to have something to do with this photograph, which has to have something to do with my adoption. What if we just go, find my birth certificate, that will prove one way or the other.”

“And how would we do that?”

“I already looked it up. You can request vital records at the city hall, but you have to go in person.”

“Wait. You already know where to go?”

Loki nods. “I remember it,” He says. “From when I found my adoption papers. It’s a place called Utgard. A three hour drive west.”

Thor stands and starts pacing. “You remember that and not your name?”

Loki closes his eyes and tries to remember, as he’s done half a dozen times since finding the photograph. He doesn’t remember seeing his name on the page, just the place, the word ‘adoption’ and the way it felt when his whole world collapsed on his head.

“I don’t remember. But if we go, we can find it.”

“Okay. How about we make a deal? If we pull your birth certificate, and _this_ is your name, I’ll admit that something strange is going on. We’ll take it all to the cops and find you a new place to live, and figure out where to go from there.”

“Fine.”

“And, if it turns out not to be your name, we go to the psychiatrist.” Loki freezes. “If this is all in your head, if you’re getting paranoid, maybe it’s your meds, maybe you need to adjust the dose-”

“I don’t want to be locked up again.” That feeling, of being pinned down, turns his stomach.

“You’re not going to be locked up again. You’re not crazy, you’re not dangerous, you just…might need a little more help right now. They’re not going to hold you, not unless they think you’re going to hurt yourself again.”

“They did, two years ago. I _wasn’t_ acting crazy, I wasn’t going to hurt myself, and Father…he told them…he told them to…” He cuts off, looking away.

“I know. But Loki, you’re over eighteen now. He can’t have you involuntarily committed like that again. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. So. If we go, and there’s nothing?”

Loki hesitates a moment longer. “Fine. We make an appointment with the doctor.” Thor looks relieved. “But I _know_ I’m not making this up.”

“I believe you.” Though he doesn’t quite sound like he means it. “So. Utgard.”

Loki smiles. “I’ve already got it in the GPS.”

 

“Loki…Loki… _Loki!_ ” He starts awake, gasping. He’s got a crick in his neck from leaning at an odd angle on the car window. He settles back, massaging it out. The road stretches before them.

“Where are we?”

“Forty minutes out of Utgard.” Thor glances at him, then back at the road. He looks concerned. “You were crying. In your sleep.” Loki blinks, surprised. But sure enough, he touches his cheek and his fingers come away wet. “What were you dreaming about?”

“I…don’t know.” He tries to remember, but he only gets flashes. “It was dark. And cold. I think…I think I was alone.”

“Hm.”

They’re quiet for almost fifteen minutes as they drive closer to answers. Loki thinks about his nightmares, about what he has seen. “Thor?” Loki finally says. “Do you ever wish you hadn’t found me, that night?”

“What?”

“The night that I-”

“I know what night you’re talking about.” Thor doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “What do you mean by that? Why do you think…why would you think that I would wish that?”

Loki shrugs. “It was in one of my dreams. You said you wished you hadn’t found me, that it was too much, to try and help me when I’m like this. It would have been easier if I had died, and you could have lived with good memories, and not…this.” Loki rests his head against the window, feeling the chill from outside seeping in.

“Loki, I cannot believe…how could you say…” Thor sighs and runs his hand down his face. His eyes look suspiciously glassy. He seems to be struggling to compose his thoughts. “Truthfully, Loki,” He says and his voice is thick. “Truthfully. Yes. I wish I had not found you. It was…it was the worst day of my life.” He swallows. Loki goes very, very still, watching his brother intently. “But it is not, and it _never_ will be, because I do not wish you were alive. I will never, _ever_ wish that you were not here. No matter what you do to me, I will always, _always_ be glad you’re alive. Do you understand?” Loki says nothing. “It is important to me that you tell me you understand.”

“I understand,” He whispers.

“I wish that I had not found you, because I wish you had not done it. Or that I had been there sooner, while you were still coherent and I could comfort you. Or that I had been there sooner still, and I could have helped before you’d taken the pills.”

“I’m sorry,” Loki says.

Thor wipes at his face. “It’s fine. I am not looking for an apology. How much do you remember from that night?” It is a blank spot in his mind.

“Nothing.”

“I came home early.” Loki’s not sure he wants to hear this, but it seems important that Thor tell it. “I don’t know why I did. I don’t know. I was tired, I was bored. So I came back to the house instead of staying at that stupid reunion party. Everything looked normal at first. I saw the note for you from our parents. I was just planning to grab a beer and wait, but I heard a noise from upstairs. I followed it, calling out your name. I heard the water running in the bathroom, but it sounded weird. It was because it was the sink, not the shower. I don’t know why you turned it on. I opened the door…and, and you were sprawled out, covered in vomit. For a second, I thought you weren’t breathing, but you made this horrible gasping sound and…I called 911 and knelt beside you. You were too far gone to hear me, and you started having this _fit_. A seizure, I guess. Your limbs jerked, and there was blood on your lips. When it stopped, I tried to hold you and you fought me and I just remember thinking ‘he’s going to be okay, if he’s strong enough to fight you like this, he’s strong enough to survive.’” Loki still says nothing. Just watches quietly as Thor’s hold over his emotions weakens. “But in the ambulance, you went limp and the paramedics…they pushed me aside and put that tube down your throat. Your blood pressure kept dropping, and they said your organs were starting to shut down. I reached out to hold your hand and it was so cold…”

By the end, Thor is crying too hard to drive. He pulls to the side of the road, and buries his face in his hands. His shoulders shake with silent sobs. Loki reaches out, awkward, hesitant.

“Thor-”

As soon as his fingers brush Thor’s shoulder, Thor wraps his arms around him, pulling him into a tight embrace. Loki feels Thor’s shuddering breaths against the skin of his neck. He buries his face in Loki’s hair and they stay like that for a long time.

 

They pull up to city hall and Thor puts the car in park.

“You’re sure you want to go in alone?”

“Yes. It’s fine, I’m just talking to the clerk, you don’t have to dog me everywhere.” Thor’s eyes are rimmed red still. Loki gives him a small smile. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

The city clerk is reading a book at the desk. He looks up when Loki enters.

“Ah, hello.” Loki forces himself to appear relaxed, casual. “I’m here about a birth certificate. My copy was accidentally destroyed and I need to renew my passport.”

“Of course,” The clerk says, putting the book aside. He has a very deep, calm voice. “Name?” Loki smiles.

“Here’s the thing. I’m not exactly sure. I was adopted, and there was a small fire…all our documents were destroyed. And unfortunately…unfortunately I’m not in the position to ask my parents for my birth name…”

“It’s no problem,” The clerk says. “Happens all the time. The adoption agency or social worker will have registered the name change with the state. We’ll be able to find the documents you need under either name. Do you have the date of birth? And you’re sure this is the correct county?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” He shows the clerk his ID. “It’s possible that the first name is the same.”

“That’s not typical, not in infant adoption cases.”

“Right. Just…I have reason to believe it might be. If it helps.” The clerk disappears into the back room. He emerges fifteen minutes later.

“Well wouldn’t you know, you were right. The first name was the same. Guess your adoptive parents must have liked it.” He sets a folder down on the counter. “Here are your documents. If I may offer some advice?” The man lowers his voice. “Don’t lose this one. And don’t come back here ever again.” The polite smile falls from Loki’s face.

“Thank you.” Outside, he pauses to open the folder. Inside, are his adoption papers, the ones he found hidden in a shoebox at the bottom of the closet when he was fifteen. The ones that had led to a screaming match with his father, and the first time he tried, with a bottle of pills on an isolated trail, a hiker walking his dog who called 911 before the drugs could finish the job. He runs his fingers over the ink, over the fresh seal. Opposite are two copies of his birth certificate.

His blood runs cold.

 

He climbs back into the passenger seat of his brother’s car and wordlessly hands over the folder, watching as Thor opens it and inhales sharply. He lets all the air out in a slow whoosh.

“Okay. So the name is the same.”

“It’s the same. This is a picture of me.” Loki grabs the photograph and thrusts it at his brother. “That’s not all.” He tells Thor what the clerk said. “He was warning me away.”

Thor is quiet for a long time, looking at the picture.

“That is suspicious,” He says finally.

“Right? I wasn’t just being paranoid. Something is going on. Thor, I think something happened here. Something that we _need_ to find out.” Thor says nothing. “A photograph of me with my birth name on it, shows up in the empty apartment next door. Then the scratching, the moans, the dreams, the _lights_. Something is going on.”

“Okay. We’ll keep looking into it. But it’s getting late, let’s just hold off until tomorrow. We’ll stay the night, there’s a motel up the road that has a vacant room.”

They check into the cramped, cheap motel and order pizza for dinner. Loki takes a shower and when he gets out, he finds Thor sitting on his bed, hunched over the folder. And the photograph. He closes it and sets it aside when he notices Loki watching him.

“All set? My turn?” Thor sniffles suspiciously. Loki nods.

While Thor is in the shower, Loki crawls between the covers and shuts his eyes. He is exhausted, drained, feeling raw like he’s been scoured clean from the inside. He drifts off to the sound of the shower.

He wakes when a weight settles on the edge of the bed. The room is silent, and dark. He opens his eyes to slits and can just barely make out Thor’s silhouette, framed by the light of the vacancy sign outside the window. Thor doesn’t notice he’s woken, or at least stays quiet about it. Loki closes his eyes.

A heavy, gentle hand settles onto his head, smoothing back his hair. The motion repeats. He thinks for a moment about making a show of waking, but then Thor sighs and sounds so sad and tired that he doesn’t. And it feels good, he quietly admits to himself, that soft, soothing touch. He doesn’t think he’s been touched like this, with such pure affection, in a very, very long time.

If he moves minutely closer, well, it’s too dark to see.

 

In the morning, Loki wakes to the sound of Thor’s snoring. He can’t believe he slept at all last night.

He throws a pillow across the room and Thor wakes with a grunt.

“You were snoring.”

“I was not.” Thor rolls over, burying his face in the pillows. “And why are you waking me so damn early?”

“We have things to do. And I’m assuming you don’t want to spend another night here.”

“What do we have to do?”

“We have to figure out what the clerk was warning me about! Why did he say I should never come back?”

“Are you sure you want to know? We could just return-”

“I want to know, Thor.” His brother still hesitates. “Please.”

“Fine. Where do we start?”

“The library?”

“Coffee first.”

 

The library is attached to the historical society, located in a small brick building on the corner of the main street. And it is open, a bored man with a name tag that reads ‘archivist’ sitting at the front desk. He perks up a bit when they approach.

“Hello,” Loki says with a smooth smile. “We’re looking for some local information and hope you could help us. We’re looking for something that happened 19 years ago-”

“Oh! The Laufeyson case? Yup, we have one box of files on that.” Loki’s stomach drops, but he keeps his face neutral. He feels Thor tense beside him.

“Yes.”

“Sure thing. Are you guys affiliated anywhere?” Loki makes something up about a university in the city, a professor, but the archivist doesn’t even ask for any verification or IDs before going off to find them the file. He directs them to the reading room, which is empty. They take up a table, nervously waiting for him to return with the materials.

“It’s a bad sign, right?” Thor whispers. “That he knew what you were talking about?”

“I don’t know if it’s _bad_. It just means we’re on the right track. Something _did_ happen here, with my real family, and something has been directing us to find out what.”

Thor runs his hands through his hair. He’s bouncing his knee nervously. “I wish you would stop calling them that.”

“Calling them what?”

“Your real family.”

Loki looks down at his hands. “I suppose you’re right,” He says, very quietly.

Thor sighs. “I just mean that-”

“Here’s the box,” The archivist sets it down. “You said you were researchers?”

“Yes.” Thor gives the archivist a charming smile. “A professor in the city might want to use this case for his next article.” Loki says nothing. His fingers itch to open the file.

“Great, so you know the drill then. One folder from the box at a time, keep it laying flat on the table. If you need a reading lamp, they’re on the shelf just there, magnifiers are in the bottom drawer. No books in this collection, not yet at least, so you shouldn’t need holders or weights. Let me know if you need anything else. And if you ask me,” He says. “I think there’s way more than an article here. Maybe a book even! You should tell your boss that.” Thor smiles politely at him. When the archivist leaves them, Thor pulls the box towards himself. Loki snatches it back.

“Loki, I think I should just-”

“It’s _my_ family, isn’t it?” He snaps. “And you don’t need to protect me.” Thor sets his mouth in a firm line, but says no more. Loki opens the box.

He pulls out the collection guide first, bound in a plastic folder, and hands it to Thor. Then he looks through the labels on the tabs and the floor drops out from under him.

_1\. Newspaper Clippings - General_

_2\. Newspaper Clippings - Murder Case_

_3\. Photographs_

_4\. Confession/Suicide Note - Photocopy_

_5\. Autopsy Report - Text_

_6\. Social Services File_

_7\. Physical Examination of Surviving Infant_

_8\. Witness Testimonies_

_9\. List of Possible Connected Crimes_

_10\. Conspiracy Theories_

_11\. Article Copy - ’The Photograph Killer: Was Laufeyson a Serial Killer?’ by L. Anders_

“It says he was an amateur photographer,” Thor whispers. “That’s where all the photographs in the file come from.”

“That’s your takeaway from this?” Loki says sharply.

“Loki…”

“I’m _fine_.” His hand shakes as he draws out the second folder and lays it flat on the table to page through the worn newsprint.

_GRISLY MURDER-SUICIDE IN UTGARD_

_MAN KILLS WIFE, SELF IN ISOLATED HOUSE - INFANT SON LEFT ALIVE_

_Utgard - Thursday night, an electric worker conducting a routine check of the meters discovered the grisly scene of the crime at a quiet house just off the highway. “I knocked on the door, and no one answered,” Brian Harris recalls. “But I could hear a baby crying and the door was unlocked. When I opened it, the smell overcame me.” Harris retreated back to his vehicle and radioed for police. Uniformed officers arrived promptly and entered the home, finding two partially decomposed bodies. A suicide note dated three nights before had the husband confessing to murdering his wife in a rage, then police say he killed himself with a shotgun. Their infant son was unharmed, though dehydrated and malnourished from three days isolation in the house. He is being treated at the local hospital and is expected to make a full recovery. “I know there are rumors of photographs taken by the deceased of the crime scene,” Chief Robinson of the Utgard Police Department said in a statement late Friday. “But we are not ready to release any documents until a full investigation of the circumstances has taken place.”_

Loki’s breath echoes in his own ears. The reading room feels very far away. At reception, two girls have entered and begun a conversation about a popular book series with the archivist, and their voices seem to come from very far off. He pushes the folder towards Thor and, violating the archivist’s rules, pulls out the folder labelled ‘Physical Examination.’ It’s a stock form, filled out in swift, slanted handwriting.

_NAME: Loki Laufeyson_

_AGE: 4 mo. DOB: 07 July 1994_

_CHIEF COMPLAINT: Dehydration/Malnutrition, Abandoned infant_

_SUMMARY: Pt admitted by PD and Social Services following discovery of infant alone in house where suspected murder/suicide took place. PD estimates infant left alone 3 days w/no food/water/care. Pt lethargic when found, but has good, loud cry when put down in crib and when stuck with IV._

_TREATMENT: Pt given IV fluids. Will graduate to trying enhanced formula in 6 hours. Request NICU volunteers to ER to hold infant, as ER staff doesn’t have time/resources for 24 hour contact that infant requires. Upon discharge, remand child to social services to be placed in foster care._

When he’s seen enough, Loki does the same as before, pushing the folder towards Thor and selecting another. The photographs this time. He flips through them, numb.

They are an odd assortment of shots. Some that are perhaps of the house. Some of the town. Then there are the ones that clearly come from the same series as the one Loki found in the apartment. The hospital, the baby. In all the photos that the man is in, his face is blank, devoid of any emotion except the occasional shot when he looks hatefully at the camera, even with his infant son in his arms.

Loki thinks he might have seen enough of the folders. He feels a bit faint.

Thor’s hand comes to rest on his lower back and is the only thing that keeps him from bolting.

“ _Jesus_ , Loki,” He whispers. “I can’t believe…”

“I didn’t really expect this either…” He chuckles grimly. Thor moves in a way that makes Loki think he’s about to embrace him. “Don’t. He’ll get suspicious, he’ll know we’re not just research assistants.”

“I don’t think it really matters, I don’t think he really cares, he’s not even at-”

“I think I need some air,” Loki says. “Alone. Just a minute, I promise.” He doesn’t look back, just rises and charges through the double doors to outside. He gasps in clean air and closes his eyes.

“You want to know the real story?” Loki turns his head towards the voice. The archivist, leaning against the side of the library and smoking. “There’s another story, more than what the file says.”

“Why are you telling me this?” The archivist shrugs.

“Seemed like you two’d be interested. It’s a good story.” He takes a drag. “So the file says domestic assault, murder-suicide, right? Just puts it down to a violent guy, real asshole. But, there’s something else. The years that they lived here, there were girls who used to disappear, up and down the freeway. Hitchhikers, street workers, drug addicts. People who wouldn’t be missed. The usual.”

“You think he was a serial killer.”

“I’ve done some digging myself,” He arches an eyebrow. “I think he mighta been. There were others, in the towns they lived in before. There was one house, not far from one of their past addresses, where the police found a bunch of bodies under the floorboards. And scratch marks on the wood, like they’d been buried alive and tried to get out. Lots of mysterious bodies, lots of mysterious disappearances, seemed to follow them. The profile changed a bit, so the cops don’t want to commit to it, especially now that he’s dead. But I think they are connected.” Loki abruptly feels very nauseous. “See, I think, he was a maniac. A monster. But one of those smooth ones, where no one really knows until it’s too late. So he gets married, has a baby, all while raping and killing and all that other sick stuff. So the night of the last murder, she finds out. I don’t know, finds mementos, records.”

“Photographs, maybe?” Loki says quietly.

“Yeah, right, exactly. So she finds them, she confronts him, and he just blows up. Kills her in a rage, and I mean a _rage_ , there are some fucked up autopsy photos if you check by the morgue. So he snaps, and then after, with her on the floor and the baby crying upstairs,” Loki flinches, turning his back so the archivist cannot see. “He feels remorse for the first time. Real regret. Who knows what made him take the pictures. But he takes all these pictures of the body, of the house, writes the note, then sits down next to his dead wife and puts the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth.”

“You’ve got a good imagination.”

The archivist shrugs. “Not much else to do in a town this small. Especially since for a while that was all people could really talk about. Nothing else happens around here. You know, the house is still standing, the one listed in the file. Sometimes kids break in, say it’s haunted, obviously,” He laughs. “Might make for a good visual feature. For the professor’s article, right?”

“Well. I suppose. Thanks for the information.”

“Sure, man. Let me know if you need anything else. You think that professor’s going to write about this case?”

“We’ll see.” Loki returns to Thor, who’s still flipping through pages of the file. He sits at the desk.

“Feeling better?”

He nods. “I want to check out the house.”

“The house? Why?”

“Yes. I just…Thor, I just need to see.” Thor looks at him for a long moment. And then agrees. They pack up the file, set it on the returns desk, and put the address into the GPS.

The house is a two story house painted a grayish blue, right off the highway. It’s rundown, weeds crawling up the sides and broken glass sticking out of the sides of the window frames.

“Are you sure about this?” Thor asks.

“I just want to look around.”

“Loki, I’m just…I’m worried. God, I can’t stop thinking…” He trails off, looking at the house.

“Thinking about what?”

“You. You, alone and crying, and…no one came for you.”

Loki is silent for a minute, looking at the house. He thinks about it too, that odd space of time he has no way of remembering, when he had a different family, a different life. He wonders how it must have felt, to be a infant, crying and crying, expecting someone to come and they never did. Only three months old. Three days must feel like an eternity to a baby of that age. Crying and crying…abandoned. Tears well in his eyes.

“When we get back to the city,” Loki says after a long while. “I think I’m going to make an appointment with the psychiatrist. You’re right, I think…I think I…I need…”

Thor rests his hand on Loki’s shoulder.

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Loki nods. “I know. You’ll help me? You won’t leave me?”

“Of course not. Never.” Thor squeezes his shoulder. “Maybe it’s a good idea for you to move in with me for a little while. Okay?”

He nods. “I think that…I think I’d like that. I certainly can’t go back to that studio.”

“We’ll figure it all out when we get back.”

“Right. When we get back.” Loki looks at the house and takes a deep breath. “But first, this.”

“Okay. This first.”

It’s not quiet in the house. There are birds chirping in the trees and the sounds of cars from the highway. But there is a certain stillness, like a cloud has settled over them that muffles the sound. There’s some graffiti, some broken furniture, beer bottles.

“The archivist said the kids in town think this place is haunted. They break in sometimes.” Loki tells Thor.

“Every town has at least one house like that,” Thor remarks. “Kids dare each other to spend the night in the haunted house.” In the kitchen, they find the remains of a small fire, and a pile of photographs on the counter. Loki’s heartbeat quickens and he snatches them up before Thor has a chance to. He flips through them. Most are of the house, at night, showing it as it was before the fall into disrepair and destruction. He stops on one. “What is it?” He wordlessly hands the photo over.

The photo shows a baby, him presumably, in a crib, crying so hard his face was nearly purple. The baby reaches out to him, little hands frozen in a grasping motion. Thor’s face spasms.

“Fuck,” He says under his breath. “What the _fuck?_ This is you, right? It’s the same blanket from the other photo, how the _fuck_ is it here, after all this time? Just lying on the counter?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the _fuck_ is going on?”

“I don’t _know_ , Thor.”

Thor looks back at the photograph. He touches Loki’s shoulder, then his neck, like he can’t help himself. “Loki…I don’t know what to do.”

That scares him, more than Loki would like to admit. “Let’s just keep going. We’ll just…take a look. And then we’ll go back to the city, right? We’ll turn around and go home, and I’ll move out of that apartment and sleep on your couch and we’ll figure out what to do from there.” He takes a shaky breath. “Please just tell me it is going to be okay.”

“It’s going to be okay.” Thor doesn’t quite sound certain. His hand, on the back of Loki’s neck, is warm and heavy. “I swear, brother, it’s going to be okay.”

Loki nods tightly. “There’s one room left on this floor.”

The back living room, with a wide window out onto the forest. It’s all wood paneling, with a broken down, scorched brick fireplace.

There’s a small rectangular piece of paper on the floor.

“Look at this,” Thor says. “Another photograph. Oh…oh Gods. No, Loki, don’t look.” But he’s too late. Thor tries to hide it from him but Loki grabs it out of his hand. He sucks in a shocked breath when he makes sense of the image.

It’s a woman. Clearly dead. Clearly violently beaten. Half decomposed, eyes bulging out of her skull. The floor in the photograph matches the one they stand on now. Loki feels suddenly very, very nauseous.

“Loki,” Thor says from a long way off. Loki blinks and Thor is gone. The photograph is gone. Instead, the corpse is on the floor, lying in a deep scarlet pool of blood. Time rewinds and the woman is standing, screaming in the face of the man from the photograph, whose face gets progressively redder.

“What the fuck is this? What the _fuck?_ ” The woman screams, over and over. “It was you, it was you! All those girls, all those fucking girls, and you buried them beneath the houses!” The man with the hateful eyes - his father - snaps. He grabs her by the throat and cracks the woman’s head against the windowsill, showering Loki with blood. He staggers back, cowering in the corner as the man beats the woman to death. It takes a surprisingly long time. Her panicked, animalistic shrieks fade to low moans, but the man does not stop.

“It’s a dream,” Loki says to himself. “It’s a dream, it’s not real.” He’ll open his eyes soon. He’ll open his eyes and be back in the motel room. Or his apartment. Or Thor’s living room. The car. It doesn’t matter how real this feels, the others had all felt just as real. It doesn’t matter that he can taste blood on his lips and feel solid wood against his back.

He hears a baby start to cry from another room.

When the woman is dead, nearly unrecognizable as a body, the man lets out an inhuman howl.

Loki opens his eyes. He is still in the run down house, flat on his back on the floor, though he doesn’t remember falling. His back aches though, as if he had impacted the floor. He sits up gingerly. The man and woman are gone. The blood is gone.

Thor is gone.

“Thor?” He calls and receives no answer. He shakily gets to his feet. “Thor?” He searches the house, calling his brother’s name, but there’s no one there. He goes out the front door, growing increasingly frantic when he sees the car is still precisely where they parked it. “Thor!” He cries. Still nothing, but the sound of the faint breeze in the trees. “Shit, _shit!_ ” In a swirling panic, he searches the house again, but still finds nothing. “ _Fuck!_ Thor, where are you? God, where did you go?” He returns, eventually, to the room where the murder occurred and collapses into a tight ball. “What the _fuck_ , Thor, what the _fuck!_ How dare you just leave me, you just promised, what the fuck!?” He sits in the center of the room, panicked and praying that Thor will return, for a long time. Then he hears it.

Scratching. Against the wall.

Slowly, he unravels himself, sniffling. “Thor?” He calls out. He follows the sound of the scratching to the hallway. There’s a door, which opens to a closet. An empty closet. He sobs. “What the _hell?_ ”

“Loki.” He snaps his gaze back to the room. In the center, where the corpse had once lay, stands his mother. The one he had known as his mother for most of his life.

“Loki,” Frigga says. “No.”

A voice in his head that sounds like Odin’s whispers, _you never should have come here_.

“Mama-” He takes a step towards her, but then he’s yanked backward by an incredible force, pulled down the hallway. The hall grows impossibly long and dark, doorways passing by him at ever increasing speed, traveling so fast it feels like falling.

He opens his mouth to scream-

 

-and wakes, sputtering and gasping, on the freezing rock of Sanctuary. He manages to get to his hands and knees in time to vomit. His whole left side feels bruised, like he’s just impacted on the rock after a long, long fall.

“You see? I took you from the Void, I can put you back.” Thanos’s voice comes from somewhere above him.

Convulsive sobs wrack his form. “Please, please,” He begs and he doesn’t know what he’s begging for. The memories, confused and muddled, swirl together in his mind. He gags. “What did you do to me? _What did you do to me?_ ”

He is a nineteen year old human, scared of ghosts. He is a prince of Asgard, cast from his home. He is a thousand other things and nothing.

“Welcome back to Sanctuary, Loki of Asgard.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a garbage person. This is the worst fandom thing I've ever done. Burying a 'what happened to Loki on Sanctuary' behind a weird 12k word Horror AU, I don't even know where this came from. 
> 
> Humorous self-deprecation aside, I had a lot of fun writing this. Scared myself a bit too. The night I wrote the bulk of the nightmares and Loki hearing things from the apartment, I was a little too spooked to sleep. 
> 
> Some notes: 
> 
> *Vagueness explained! None of this was real!! So things like, Loki's psychological diagnoses, the setting, secondary characters, obtaining adoption papers...inaccuracies/vagueness is explained by 'this is all in Loki's head, twisting his memories/fantasies with the weird magic of the scepter/Void.' (Though I did get real deep into research on adoption papers before I realized it wouldn't actually matter than much because it wasn't real. Downloaded example forms and everything. Then I was like...none of this is real, twice over, it does not have to be based on actual law...) 
> 
> I did a couple other things as well that I was like 'oh people are going to think I'm just not a good AU writer' - like, I tried to make their language register occasionally change, especially towards the end. (Like, Thor mostly uses 'God' as a show of surprise, but the last time he says 'Gods', plural. He calls Loki 'brother' which isn't super normal to do for actual 21st century speech.) It goes back and forth between being informal/formal and that's intentional!
> 
> *Can you tell I'm a historian because I needed to not only explain the archive rules, but point out that Loki was breaking them? Follow archive rules, friends! One folder at a time! 
> 
> *Other _Thor_ characters make unnamed cameos. And there are a few canon references as well! Curious to see if anyone guesses right. 
> 
> *Lastly, I owe a creative debt to a number of fantastic atmospheric horror/mystery series on Netflix - including but not limited to _Requiem, Hotel Beau Séjour, Les Revenants, The Sinner,_ and _Dark_. All highly recommended. Additional debt is owed to the 1990 film _Jacob's Ladder_ even if I didn't realize it until I watched it last week with my friends. (I'd seen it in college and it stuck with me, but rewatching it really drove home how much of this chapter echoed that film.) 
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you, so much for reading this. Seriously. Thank you. Comments are gold.


	2. violent sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stillness.
> 
> Loki lets go of the staff and expects to die. 
> 
> Except the Norns have never smiled upon him. 
> 
> Or: Loki on Sanctuary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> violent sky warnings: suicide attempt. torture, both physical and psychological. the torture is pretty intense, folks. rape/noncon elements. graphic violence. psychological conditioning, gaslighting, mental manipulation.

Stillness. Loki has always had a talent for finding stillness in the midst of chaos. He finds it now, as chaos of his own making roils around him. The bridge crumbles and collapses, the Void drags on his body. He looks up at Thor’s pleading face. He finds stillness even in the mess of his own emotions - rage turned to pain, longing turned to hate, love to grief - and he knows what to do.

“No, Loki,” His once-father says. Stillness. Gungnir is cold in his hand. He takes a deep, hitching breath, tears streaming down his skin, cold on his face. Peace.

He lets go.

 

He is sure that he will die quickly now. His brother’s face, from where he dangles off the edge of the bifrost, recedes. He sees nothing now but darkness, so he closes his eyes against it. He feels nothing but the pain of the air being driven from his lungs, and the cold.

He does not die.

When he realizes he is not dying, he opens his eyes and tries to suck in a breath but there is no air. The feeling of choking, suffocating, continues but his consciousness does not fade, not even for a moment. He remains horrendously alert, in agony, clawing at his throat and chest, as he falls and falls.  

 _No_ , he thinks. _No!_ He opens his mouth to scream but the Void steals away the sound as soon as he makes it. There is just the awful silence, nothingness, as the stars fly past him. He is cold, so cold.

 

He falls, with the sickening feeling of the drop in his stomach and the burn from the lack of air in his lungs constant, but he still remains horrifyingly conscious.

The world twists and bends around him.

There is sometimes light, purple and swirling, sometimes rainbow like the bifrost and he think he might be saved. But then everything goes black and he cannot even see his hand before his face. Most often there are stars and they seem to mock him.

There is something there. A whisper. A presence. He tries to twist but he cannot control his fall. But he feels something _there_. Magic, or a creature. He half expects to be attacked but whatever it is never shows itself.

 

The visions begin.

 

Serpents snarl at him, tangle around his limbs and bite at him. He watches as Laufey comes through the portal and slaughters all of Asgard, turning it into a frozen wasteland.

He is in the shape of a wolf, stalking through the snow, hunting a deer that darts through the frosted grass. A trap snaps closed around his leg, the shock of pain and sudden coppery taste of blood in the air making him howl. He starves to death, broken and trapped in this form, until the ice is falling away and he is falling through the stars again.

He is the one banished to Earth, locked up by the humans in their little sterile bubble. Days pass as they poke and prod at him and titter about his unusual biology, sticking him with needles and violating his body, until Thor comes and tells him that Odin is dead and he can never come home.

He is not even himself. He is someone that looks like him and talks like him, but remembers nothing. He is mortal and has never heard of Asgard. He is walking on a bridge when a man he does not recognize, with long blond hair, pushes him suddenly over the barrier. Instead of hitting the water he falls and falls until he is back in the Void.

 

He freezes and burns. Shatters and twists. He loses his mind. Regains it.

 

He is nothing. He is no one. He has never heard of Loki. Never heard of Thor, of Odin, of Frigga. Never seen the sun or held air in his lungs or known true stillness.

 

Still he falls.

 

Until he lands. Hard.

He lies very, very still, hoping beyond hope that this will be the end. He certainly feels as though he is dying. Every bone feels shattered, his skin feels flayed.

He moans and shocks himself at the sound of his own voice. He manages to crack his eyes open a little. He’s on a rock planet, desolate, abandoned. His eyes close again and his mind drifts off.

He sleeps for the first time since before he started falling. Before Jotunheim even. 

 

He’s woken by hands. Scrabbling hands that grip his limbs and drag him out of the small outcropping he’d fallen into.

“Get off of me!” He snarls but his voice is no more than a rasp.

“Trespasser!” One of the creatures hisses and it seems to echo around him, coming from all at once. He is too weak to fight as they grip his limbs and drag him away.

They bind him with rough cord, arms twisted behind his back, force him to kneel. They clamp a collar around his neck and hook it to a chain that keeps him held bowed over, face nearly touching the stone.

“What is this?” A horrible, rasping voice asks.

“A trespasser!” The creatures all hiss. Long, pale fingers hook under Loki’s chin forcing his gaze up.

This new figure is hooded and masked. Tiny, dark eyes study him. “What is your name?”

Loki says nothing. The figure slaps him across the face.

“What is your name?”

“I will tell you nothing, so you should just kill me,” He says plainly.  

This creature make a sound that Loki takes a moment to realize is laughter. “You will tell me, before long. And you will wish you had not delayed. The Chitauri will ensure it.”

 

The Chitauri are not creative.

But they are effective, Loki has to admit that. Pinned by stakes like a butterfly mounted on a card, the Chitauri flay him alive. They break his limbs and burn his skin. They tear off what is left with his clothes and one mounts him like a beast and they all shriek with shared excitement as the Chitauri thrusts into him. The way is soon slicked with blood.

The other returns and watches them work.

Loki is too delirious to remember why he had resisted when the other asks him his name. His teeth are coated with blood. Everything aches, throbs. His hips are stretched and popped, streaked with blood that drips down his thighs.

“What is your name?”

“Loki,” He mumbles. His tongue and lips are swollen.

“Where are you from?”

“Asgard.” His breath hitches. “I was a prince. Prince of Asgard.”

The other smiles.

 

He passes out without answering any more questions. When he comes to, he is in a cage. He is still naked, but some of the blood has been washed off his skin. The cage is small, set against a stone wall. The floor and ceiling are stone, and three of the walls are barred. Everything is lit by dim blue light. When Loki crawls forward, wincing in pain as the movement aggravates his wounds, and peers out, he sees dozens of other cages set into the rock. Some have huddled creatures in them, but many are empty. He slumps back, crossing his arms over his chest and biting his nail. “ _Damn_.”

“Welcome.”

He jumps at the voice. “Who are you?” He rasps.

“No names. That is better.”

“Where are we? What is this place?”

“Sanctuary.” Loki bites back a hysterical laugh. “That’s what he calls it.”

“He?”

“Thanos. Our benefactor?” Loki sees the figure cage to his right shift. It is too dark to properly see the figure, but by the way they move Loki knows they are the one who has been speaking. “You do not know Thanos? How did you get here?”

“I fell.” Loki’s head spins at the thought of the Void. “I fell a long…” He has to stop as his stomach flips and spasms. He leans over as he vomits up blood-flecked bile onto the floor. The heaves go on a long time, until they hurt. Tears stream down his face.

“Most of us were taken. Thanos comes to our planets and slaughters our people and always chooses one to return with him. Most of us will die here. Some will be…converted. The youngest will perhaps be one of his Children, if they last long enough. But most will die.”

“Why not just kill us now?”

“That would be too easy.”

They fall silent for a long time. There comes suddenly the sound of screaming, from another cage. The sound of someone who has shattered past the point of no return. Chitauri swarm, clattering across the stone. The screaming crescendos and abruptly stops.

“Don’t do _that_ ,” The voice says.

 

It becomes clear that Sanctuary is nothing but a place for pain. And sometimes death, but that is not for the likes of Loki. No. He is kept on the brink. Tormented for as long as his body will stand it, then allowed to recover.

It doesn’t take long for him to be unravelled, spun back to little more than a child. In the throes of agony, he cries out for his parents, for his brother. He begs them to come for him, to save him, and his torturers laugh in the face of his tears.

Days, perhaps, this goes on. There’s no way to know. There is nothing to mark the passage of time. The stars only stare silently down at him.

The Other - which Loki learns is his true name, as far as anyone in the cages knows - says that they have to be sure he is speaking the truth. “Our mission is too important to risk,” He hisses in his horrible voice. Loki is bound, naked and spread eagle, to an iron frame. He’s been chained there a long time. “If you are a snake we will find out. We will burn it out of you.” The iron is hot against his skin. The other touches it to his throat and he tries to twist to get away. “You must not be allowed to jeopardize our master’s vision.”

“Not lying,” Loki croaks, feeling dry and wrung out. “No, not…not lying.”

“We will soon see.”

 

Loki is curled on his side in the cage when he hears heavier footsteps on the stone, far heavier than the scuttling of the Chitauri or the whispering footsteps of the Other.

“That’s him,” The voice from the darkness whispers. “That’s Thanos.”

Thanos is massive, tall and broad. He is accompanied by two others, a slender grey-skinned man in a long robe and a bald woman with blue skin, dressed in fitted leathers.

“Bring it forward,” Thanos says. His voice is deep. He points a finger. “That one.”

A prisoner is dragged from his cage, kicking and screaming. His wails trail him as the Chitauri drag him before Thanos.

“Rejoice,” The man accompanying Thanos says. “Your life will be a sacrifice to our great vision for the universe.”

“No, please,” The prisoner begs. “Please, I’m ready, I can do this, please no-”

Thanos waves a hand and the Chitauri impale the prisoner with a long blade. As he gurgles on blood, Thanos reaches out and snaps his neck. The body drops limp on the blade. They leave it there. Thanos casts his eyes over the cages. He smiles wide, the grin stretching the lines on his face. Then he turns and goes, without another word.

“They do that sometimes,” The voice says. “It’s always at random. They’ll clean up the corpse later.”

Loki’s heart is beating fast in his chest. He cannot take his eyes off the body.

 

Eventually, the Chitauri are deemed too ineffectual, or perhaps he has graduated to a new level in this mysterious world.

He meets Ebony Maw.

They give him clothes, rough, black cloth. Ebony Maw doesn’t need to harm his body. He’s there to harm his magic.

“Please,” Loki breaks at the first horrible tendrils of Maw’s power wrap around his seidr. “Please, just-” He cuts off with a scream as the pain reverberates through every cell. Through his own screams he can hear Maw’s laugh.

His magic thus far had been a mere echo, a whisper inside of himself. He had believed it was damaged by his fall through the Void, but now that Maw has his hands inside the core of his power, it comes roaring back. The drain on it must be artificial - further bonds constraining him, like the chains and the cage.

“So lovely,” Maw coos. Loki jerks against the magical ties that suspend him off the floor. He grits his teeth against further screams as Maw does _something_ to his seidr and his whole body goes into painful spasm.

Later, in his cage, he tries to feel for his magic and the hole where it is supposed to be is as cold and empty as the Void.

He wraps his arms around his aching, hungry torso and tries to think of nothing.

 

While Ebony Maw _toys_ with his magic, a woman stalks in, the other one who had accompanied Thanos the day he killed the prisoner. She is seething with bitter rage.

“Nebula,” Ebony Maw says with a sickly sweet smile. The horrible, violated feeling recedes, leaving Loki panting in the suspension. “Welcome.”

“Father said it is my turn.”     

“Oh? What happened this time, lose another bout to Gamora-” Nebula snarls and throws a blade at Maw. He deflects it, cackling. “Or did you fail? I heard he had sent you to seek the Power Stone, did things not go well?”

“Get out!”

“Don’t you want my powers to hold him?” Maw asks. His long, spiny fingers settle in Loki’s hair, stroking back with a false tenderness.

“It doesn’t look like it would take much to hold him.”

“Yes, but it’s such fun. Asgardian magic is such a joy to play with.”

Loki tries to jerk away, hissing.

“Bind him to the chair, then _leave us!_ ” Nebula growls.

“As you wish, my dear.” Maw floats him on his powers to the reclined iron chair. The straps float him to pin him down. “Call me when you find you need me.”

Then Loki is alone with this Nebula.

She takes up a knife and starts to cut off his clothes.

“Your father,” Loki whispers. “What does he want?” Nebula doesn’t answer. “What is this all, what is the _point?_ ” She abruptly stabs the knife into his side. The breath is driven from his lungs at the feeling of the blade, hot in his flesh. She twists it.

“Thanos does not stand for weakness. Thanos does not stand for liars, or failures. He will not tolerate traitors in his midst.”

Through the pain, Loki manages to inhale to speak. “I have not…done…anything.”

“No. But he must be sure. He will not tolerate failure.”

Loki quickly learns that nothing Nebula does is about him. It's all about _her_. It makes her brutal, ruthless. She takes him apart with surgical precision.

Once, she comes still sparking from some botched upgrade to her circuitry. She uses electrodes to send pulses of electric shocks through his nerves until his nose is filled with the smell of scorched flesh and his muscles will not stop twitching.

Normally she has the Chitauri fetch him and bind him to the chair before she arrives, but one time she comes to his cage herself, waking him from a light doze. She doesn’t even bind him, just drags him away to an open section of rock and throws him down.

“Fight me,” She snarls. He notices a healing slice in her shoulder. “Fight me!”

Loki licks his lips and gingerly gets to his feet. “I’m not in any condition to-”

She lunges for him and he is forced to dodge. He makes a pitiful defense, shaking and stumbling. Nebula lands a blow to his head and he drops.

“ _Fight me!_ ” She shrieks. He gets up and does. Again and again, Nebula beats him back until he can’t get up again, braced on his elbows against the stone, gasping for breath and drenched in sweat.

“ _Fight me!_ Do it, _fight me!_ ”

He tries to rise and he can’t. He barely makes it to his hands. “I can’t,” He hisses. “I can’t.”

Nebula screams, all rage and frustration and pain. She screams into the darkness of Sanctuary and then falls to her knees and takes out her violence on the rock.

 

He doesn’t know how it happens. How he decides to survive.

It’s not all at once. Most days he still thinks of his own death, the blissful release from the pain and cold of his cage that suicide would grant him. But there is just a spark. Of rage. Or perhaps just _spite_.

But his mind begins to turn. Calculate. He observes and catalogues and notes behaviors and patterns. He decides he’s going to get out of here, at any cost. Even if he just slinks off to die somewhere else, he is not going to die _here._

Nebula is torturing him this time, with the Maw watching gleeful and maintaining the magical bonds that hold Loki’s body float in the center of the cell.

He is hogtied, back arched to make the most vulnerable parts of his center bare. Nebula is in some mood today. She is hacking at his abdomen, sticking her hand in the gore like she’s searching for something.

It comes over him suddenly. “Enough!” He roars and Nebula stops. Her expression twists in fury, but Ebony Maw is laughing. He lets the enchantment go and Loki tumbles to the floor, out of Nebula’s reach.

He thinks it’s over now, really over, and he is _afraid_. Afraid of _death_ , after all of this. So he cries. He cries in a way that he has not since the earliest days of his tortures.

Slowly, it dawns on him that he is alone. Nebula and Ebony Maw are gone.

The Other comes after a while, but he only tosses him a rough black robe and leaves.    

He doesn’t know how long he’s left alone. He sleeps like the dead, dreamless. It’s like the sudden emotional outburst left him drained.

He wakes and he finds himself unbound, wrapped in the robe. Suspicious, he does not move until he hears footsteps approaching. He raises his head enough to see a tall woman with deep red hair and bright green skin bending down towards him.

“I am to bring you to my father,” She says.

Loki coughs and pushes himself up. “You’re Gamora.”

“How did you know?”

“The way you said it.” His voice is rough, croaking. “‘Father.’ And I’ve heard of you. From Nebula.” Gamora nods. He thinks she might look a little sad. “And what fate awaits me at your hand? What new torment?”

“Nothing at my hand. No more.” She offers him a hand.

“So that’s it, then? You appear here as what…an opportunity? A balm?”

“Will you take it?”

Loki stares at her for another moment. He wonders if he resists, will she kill him? In one of Nebula’s hissing rants, she had mentioned Gamora’s work as an assassin. Maybe this is it. Maybe the balm is death.

“You have been judged strong enough to meet my father,” Gamora says firmly. “It is time.”

Loki takes her hand.

He’s weak, but he keeps his feet as she leads him up a winding set of metal stairs to the great black ship hovering over the rocks. The stairs open out into a cavernous hall. At the center is a throne. Atop the throne is Thanos.

Gamora shoves him forward until they are a few feet from her father’s throne. “Kneel.” It does not take much to drive Loki to his knees. Gamora steps off to the side.

Thanos does not address him right away, just looks down at him and smiles.

“What is your name?” Thanos’s voice echoes in the cavern.

“I have already told your emissaries. I told the Other.”

“Yes. But you have not told me.” Thanos stands and descends the short steps. He crouches before Loki. “Tell me everything.”

Loki glances up at the massive purple face, hovering so close to his own and feels something cold inside of him break open.

He tells Thanos everything.

The interrogation lasts until Loki’s lips are cracking and bleeding and he is listing to the side, barely able to hold up his head. He has to brace himself on his hands to keep from collapsing. His matted hair falls before his eyes, blocking the view of the room around him, and he keeps talking.

He only stops when Thanos’s hand falls heavily on his head and he must stop for fear. But there is no violence - just Thanos patting his head.

“Good. Welcome to Sanctuary, Loki of Asgard. The true Sanctuary.” Thanos removes his hand and returns to his throne. “Take him to get cleaned up, then have one of the others show him to a more comfortable arrangement.”

“Of course, Father.” Gamora grips his upper arm and drags him up. She does not let go as she shows him through the halls, to a room that seems like a bath.

They are not alone.

“We were curious,” One says in response to Gamora’s stern look. “You three have had all your fun with the prisoner, are we not allowed to look?” He reaches out a hand but Gamora tugs Loki away.

“Thanos said to let him clean up.”

“And we’re not going to stop you,” A female voice says. “We’re just going to look. Not touch.”

The first who had spoken growls. “Yes, you’ve had your fun these past months, Maw. Now it’s our turn.”

“He has been quite fun. Don’t be jealous, Proxima. You’ll have your turn, I’m sure.”

The female voice grunts in agreement.  

Gamora shoves him towards a stone fountain, and he must catch himself before he falls, then she hits a button. Water beings to flow. Nebula enters and Loki shudders, looking away. “Make sure the Black Order doesn’t hurt him,” Gamora commands her sister. “I can’t watch this anymore.” And she leaves.

Loki trembles and does not move.

“What’s the matter?” Ebony Maw taunts. “Scared?” Loki says nothing. “Forgotten how to wash yourself? How sad.”

“Pathetic,” Another one says.

“Will he become one of us?”

“He’s far too old,” Proxima says. “No. He has a purpose.”

Ah, a hint. He has long known that Thanos has plan for him beyond the tortures he has been subjected to, that somehow these pains were a trial, or a preparation, but he still does not understand what it is for. He listens to them chatter, willing his mind to absorb the information and turn it into useful knowledge, but the sick fear in the pit of his stomach and the pounding of his pulse in his ears makes it difficult.

Impatient, Proxima Midnight grips the robe covering him and tears it off, leaving him naked before the fountain. A bucket of cold water is dumped over him and he sputters, gasping at the sudden chill.

“Here,” Nebula hands him a brown, rough cloth. He takes it, not looking at her.

As the Black Order talks around him, he takes the cloth, soaking it in the stream, and uses it to wipe away the worst of the blood and grime. Looking down at himself reveals a wrecked body. There are a dozen half healed wounds, overlapping scars. The stitched-up scar across his abdomen still sluggishly weeps blood and pus. With a shaking breath, he sticks his head under the water and holds it there until his lungs burn. (It does not return him to the Void, like the very small, pitiful part of him wishes it would.) Then he combs out the snarls with his fingers.

Nebula gives him rough, plain black clothes and watches as he dresses. The others snicker at how stiff and gingerly he is as he pulls on the clothes. Nebula takes him to a small cell. There is a bed, a cot really, with a thin mattress and a blanket. The door is barred.

But he can stand. And lay flat. It is just as dark, and cold, but it is quieter. When Nebula leaves him, he is alone.

He lies down and falls asleep, feeling scourged out from the inside. Raw, broken, and disgusted with himself.

 

Time passes. Creeps by. His wounds heal. He knows not how long he’s been on Sanctuary. Once, laying on his side in his cold cell, he thinks of the sun. It breaks his heart. He is so desperate for the warmth of it on his face he can barely stand it. He drags his fingers down his skin and tears his rough blanket to shreds at the thought of the sun.

Thanos sees him often. Sometimes he just has him stand and watch as he works, tormenting other prisoners, disciplining the Chitauri or the Other. Dining. Other times he tells him of his plans for the universe, or asks him for details about Asgard, both wild and mundane.

 

Thanos summons him and the Other is there as well, lingering on the margin.

“Earth. Terra. You know it? I believe your people call it Midgard?”

Loki nods. His mouth is bone dry. He tries to keep the Other in his peripheral vision, but Thanos moves and he has to choose who to keep in his sight. He turns, following Thanos and loses sight of the Other. He swallows. “Yes, I…I know it well.”

“You’ve traveled there before?”

“On occasion. In my youth.”

“What did you think of the people there?”

Loki thinks back over the centuries. “They are simple,” He says. “Their mortal lives are fleeting.”

“If I sent you, with a weapon, do you think you could…ease the way? Make the planet ready for my armies to conquer it?”

A muscle in his leg keeps twitching. “Yes. On one condition.”

Thanos nods. “I will hear your condition.”

“Once I secure Midgard for you, you will let me go…and swear to leave Asgard out of it.”

There is silence for a moment, and then Thanos laughs. “Asgard…still you protect them?”

“Asgard was my home for a thousand years. You cannot be surprised there is lingering…sentiment.”

“Ha. Sentiment. There is little room for sentiment when our task is this important to the fate of the universe.”

“Still, you must understand…”

“I do not. I am gravely disappointed, Loki. I thought you had learned.”

“Perhaps he requires correction, master,” the Other hisses.

Fear boils over into anger. “I have done all you asked of me, I have told you _everything_. I have survived your fires, your trials. I have not strayed from your path. And still you hold me to your own agenda? I will swear to you, I will conquer Earth in your name, I will bring you the Tesseract, but let me be free after I have done that.”

“No. No, no, no. You still do not understand.”

“I will not be your eternal slave!” Loki snarls. Furious tears spill over. “This, this is madness. This is _insanity_. You are _depraved_. I have done what you wanted, I have told you all I knew about Asgard, the vaults, about what’s contained there, Asgard’s defenses, I told you thinks I had sworn to the Norns I would never tell another soul. I have broken all of my oaths as a prince, for you. _Norns_ , I have given you all the tools to destroy my home, to destroy the _universe_. Now _let me go!_ ”

“So you may return to Asgard and warn them of my coming?”

“No. I will not return to Asgard, I will _never_ return to Asgard.” Asgard is far, far beyond him now. Loki closes his eyes. “I will run as far away as I possibly can.” _Finish what I started_ , he thinks. _End this suffering, be free of this shame. Find somewhere to die in peace_. “And never breathe a word of you, or of Odin, or-”

Thanos looks somewhere above his shoulder. “Oh, Loki. You will regret this.”

“I’m in your head, remember? I know when you are lying.” The Other’s rasping voice, right next to his ear. There comes the sound of Ebony Maw laughing. There is a hand on his head and a spike of agony pulsing through his brain, and he’s falling through darkness-

 

-Loki blinks into awareness. From the pulsing music, colored lights, and the dress of those that bump against him, he’s in the hallway of a club. He doesn’t remember how he got there.

 

-then he lands, sputtering and gasping, feeling bruised all along his left side. Loki lies, coughing and sobbing at Thanos’s feet, for a long time, as he returns to himself. The 19 year old is stripped away, leaving the thousand year old sorcerer-prince. Fear dissolves to rage. “What did you do? _What did you_ _do to me?!_ ”

“I returned you to where I found you. The Void. Tell me what you saw there.” He struggles to get his limbs under control, but he can still barely get to his hands and knees.

“No,” He moans. “ _No!_ ”

“I can make him, master,” Ebony Maw says from behind him. “I can force him to tell you.” There’s a hand in his hair, yanking his head back so hard his spine felt ready to snap. His throat is exposed to Thanos.

“No, but hold him still. I want to see for myself.” Two Chitauri grab his arms, holding him fast. He shuts his eyes tight, head spinning. Something sharp touches his chest, then Thanos’s hand is enveloping his skull. The pain in his head spikes until all he can see is blue light. He doesn’t know how long he stays like that, silently screaming in agony while Thanos rifles through his mind. When it’s over, they drop him, limp, to the floor. Loki curls on his side, cowering.

“So that’s what you want,” Thanos muses. “Your deepest, darkest, secret wish. You want to be reconciled with your brother. You want your family to see your faults as illness, you as a poor, sick little lamb, needing care, instead of the poisonous snake you are.”

Loki weeps. He can still feel the way Thor had embraced him in the car, how desperately he had held him. And none of it was _real_.

“You want your family to forgive you, is that it? Your secret plan, to flee from me, who has so magnanimously taken you in, to return to your false family, with their lies. Do you think they would take you back?”

“They would,” He cries. Thor had sat on his bed. He’d stroked his hair. He said he loved him. “They would.” Doubt nags. _That was just the vision. You think the real Thor would be so forgiving? After all you have done?_

“Daughter,” Thanos calls. “Gamora!” She steps from the shadows where she has been silently watching. “Tell our guest about the mission I sent you on, shortly after he arrived in our home.”

Gamora looks straight at Loki, lying on the rock. Her expression is unreadable. “You sent me to Asgard.”

“No,” Loki moans. “No.”

“Tell him what you told them.”

“ _Stop!_ ”

“I told them that we had pulled the second prince of Asgard from the Void. That he was badly injured, but alive. That they should come to collect him.”

“And what did they say, daughter?”

“They said there was no second prince of Asgard. There never had been.”

“No, no, you _lie!_ ” Loki screams at her. “You’re lying! You are, it’s not true.”

“Isn’t it sad, Gamora, how he clings to those who no longer want him?”

“It is,” She says, after a pause.

“You’re lying,” He cries, pressing his fists to his eyes. “You’re _lying_.”

_I will never, ever wish that you were not here. No matter what you do to me, I will always, **always** be glad you’re alive._

But Thor never said that. That was his own mind, his deepest desires and the odd magic of the Void conjuring his fantasies. “You’re lying.” He sounds doubtful now even to his own ears.

“Why would they want you? After what you’ve done? After learning _what_ you are? Leave them behind, Loki. Take charge of yourself. I can help you, like I helped all my other Children.” Loki sobs, beyond comprehending Thanos’s words. “Take him back to his cell - no, no, take him to the box. Let him reflect in solitude.”

They drag him away and shut him in that tightest cell aboard Sanctuary, the one that stinks of blood and desperation. It’s not large enough for him to properly sit, so he is forced to remain on his feet.

He raves for a long time, pounding his fists on the iron door until his skin bruises and splits.

“Oh, brother,” A whispering voice says in his ear. “What have you done?”

Loki moans. “Stop this.”

“Stop what? It’s you doing this, it’s you doing all of this. Couldn’t you see it? And now you’re alone here.”

“I screamed for you, I cried for you,” Loki shrieks, banging his sore fists against the walls of his cell. “Why did you not come, _why?_ ”

“Perhaps I was still angry,” The voice in his head whispers. “Or perhaps you had simply outlived your usefulness.”

“What?” Loki blinks and the tears flow down his cheeks.

“Yes, you knew father had taken you for a purpose,” The voice whispers. “But you had your use to me as well. Perhaps you were suddenly more trouble than you were worth.”

Fury swells in Loki. “How dare you,” He rasps. “How dare you, I was nothing but your obedient servant for a thousand years. I worshiped the ground you walked on, I did all you asked and more. This is how you repay me? This is how you return the years of my servitude?”

“There is no repayment for the likes of you,” The voice is almost gentle again, and Loki’s expression twists. “No, this is your lot in the cosmos. To serve those stronger, better than you. You know, deep in your heart, that Thanos is right. Freedom is life’s greatest lie. You were made to be ruled. We all were, but some more than others. You most of all.”

Loki slumps back against the metal wall of the tight cell. He wishes desperately he could collapse, to sit just for a moment, but when he bends his legs his knees hit the front of the cell. His legs shake with the exertion of holding himself up.

“Stop, please, go away,” He moans. “Stop haunting me.”

“I will always haunt you,” Thor’s voice says in his mind. “Just as you once haunted me. My little shadow.”

The words, softly spoken in his mind, set off a deep, grieved longing in Loki’s chest. “Your little shadow.”

“You wish to return to my shadow? To retreat to the safety of my protection?”

“Yes,” Loki sobs. “Yes. I have _screamed_ for nothing more for weeks, months by now. Years. I have cried for you and begged you to come for me and you have _left me!_ ”

“Say it again. If you truly mean it say it again and maybe the Norns will smile upon you.”

Loki takes a deep, shuddering breath, steeling himself. “Please. Please, Thor, I _need_ you. I need you to _help_ me. I need you to come for me.” _Thor, something’s happened…Something…at my apartment. I can’t stay here, I need you to come get me…Please just come get me_. “Please, come for me.”

“No.”

With that, the voice in his head silences.

 

He spends the rest of the night raving, furious and mourning and alone. He wants to destroy himself, but he finds he is too weak to do it. In the morning, the Maw comes for him, his beaten and ragged and consumed shell of a self, and drags him before Thanos.

“What is really so tragic is your attachment to those who abused you for so long.” Something sharp pokes at his spine, but in the wake of the hysteria he feels burnt out. Eerily calm. Vaguely nauseous, dizzy, and foggy. Everything seems so distant, so removed. He blinks up at Thanos, a stupefied expression on his face. “Don’t you remember the way they shoved you down, pushed you into the shadows?”

“Yes,” He says, and he _does_. He has always felt small. The image of Thor’s sneering face and the mocking expression of his friends float before his eyes. “It’s so cold in the shadows.”

They were all real memories. All real frustrations, all real insecurities, quiet pains and rejections. But they grow larger and more consuming. Other memories are stuffed down, or just gone. Thor laughing with him, Thor letting him fall asleep in his bed, the four of them looking up at the stars in wonder on an early camping trip to Vanaheim. His mother’s face, glowing with pride at his first major spell. His father tossing him into the air and catching him, laughing.

“They abducted you,” The Other says in his ear. His claw caresses his neck, tilting his head back so he’s forced to look at Thanos. “They abducted you and told you you were to be a king and then cast you out.”

“They cast me…they cast me…” His lips feel swollen and clumsy.

“Yes,” Thanos says. “Don’t you remember?”

Loki closes his eyes. He does remember.

He remembers dangling on the bridge, holding on by his fingertips. He can do it, he can hold on. Thor reaches down for him. “Brother, _help me!_ ” His own voice seems to come from very far away. Thor takes his hand and pulls him away from the bridge. The Void tugs at his bones. Thor’s face twists in fury. The one who he had called brother flings him towards the sucking Void as he scrambles to try and hold on.

He blinks and Thor’s retreating face is replaced by Thanos. He gasps a ragged breath.

“They cast you out. You can let them go now. I can help you.”

“But…Thor’s face…” In the last second of the vision, he had seen Thor’s face, not twisted with fury, but grief. His cry of _no_ \- and how had the bridge been broken? He can’t remember.

The Other’s hand tightens its grip on his throat.

He sees it all so much more clearly this time.

The Other releases him to collapse to the ground. Loki sobs, curling into a ball. Thanos’s hand on the back of his head is gentle. He strokes Loki’s dark, matted hair.

“You’re free from them now.”

Loki lets out a sob and a dam within him gives way. “Yes,” He cries. “Yes.” They leave him alone and he cries himself to sleep on the hard rock.

 

He doesn’t know how long they let him sleep. Eventually, Gamora comes for him. She says little, just rouses him and brings him before Thanos, like she had done at the first.

Thanos is alone now, no Other or Ebony Maw, or anyone else, and he dismisses Gamora quickly after they enter.

“Drink,” Thanos says, gesturing at a jug of water on the step. “It’s not poisoned.” His voice is almost gentle. Loki takes the water jug, only realizing how thirsty he had been when the first stream of water hits his throat. He gulps it down greedily. “Sit,” Thanos directs him once he has finished. “You are weary.”

Loki’s head is full of fog. He can barely remember why he feels so tired. “It has been a long day,” He says stupidly.

“Hm, yes. But I think you’re finally ready. You are finally on the right path.” Thanos descends the staircase. His massive hand rests on Loki’s crown. “You are ready to serve, aren’t you?”

“I will do what you wish,” Loki croaks.

“They lied to you,” Thanos says. “They told you you were free while they kept you in chains. But I am telling you the truth.”

“Freedom is a lie.”

Thanos smiles. “Precisely. We all must serve. I serve a higher calling. You will serve me.” Thanos’s hand begins to move in his hair, his thumb smoothing down the tangled and matted strands. “You will go to Earth, what your people call Midgard. You will retrieve something I dearly need.”

“Yes,” Loki says, voice dull. “I have a condition.” Thanos removes his hand and glowers down at him. “Once you have taken what you want from Midgard, leave it for me. Let me rule Earth in your name. It will give you the perfect vantage point to conquer the rest of the Nine.”

“And what of Asgard?”

Loki blinks once, slowly. “Do what you will.”

Thanos smiles.

 

They give Loki space to rest. Recover. A room, far, far from the cells, where he has a bed that perhaps once would have felt hard as a rock to him but now feels like bliss. They leave him alone for a long time, only bringing him food and drink, as he sleeps and sometimes cries and heals. Then Thanos starts to summon him again, but his questions are truly _questions_ now. The sessions are brief and conclude when Loki tires, and he even gradually learns to stop expecting pain. They discuss strategy and Thanos seems to truly appreciate his contributions.

One day, the Other enters his room with Ebony Maw. He had been lying in bed, trying to think of nothing, and he tenses when they enter. Unlike with Thanos, he still expects torment from them. He sits up and presses his back to the wall, heart beating quick in his throat. “What do you want?”

“The master has decided it is time to begin practicing,” The Other says. “He has a plan. His spies and seers have reported back, it is time to begin training you for Earth’s defenses.”

“Of course,” Loki responds. He moves to rise. “I am ready.” The Maw grins and his stomach flips. It takes real effort not to cower away from him.

“Lie back down,” Ebony Maw presses on his shoulders until he is again supine on the mattress. “This will be easier if you relax.” Loki tries, but his heart is beating rapidly in his chest and he can’t stop twitching away. “ _Relax_.” The Maw’s voice is sickly sweet, poisonous in its attempt to soothe. He places one hand on Loki’s brow and suddenly Sanctuary is falling away.

In its place is a warehouse.

“This is where the Great Titan’s spies have located the Tesseract on Earth. It calls to us,” Ebony Maw’s voice says in his ear, guiding him. “Show me how you get it out of the warehouse.”

It takes him fourteen tries to get the Tesseract bundled onto the stolen truck, and out of the warehouse. Then he is given the scepter and shown how to enthrall the soldiers, create his own little army.

On and on and on it goes, for weeks and weeks. He is trained for every eventuality, every permutation of the plans. He wins, and he loses.

 

He is tortured, again and again, by the Midgardian authorities. But he is too used to pain to ever give in to it.

“Lovely,” The Maw says, stroking his hair when he surfaces. This time they had tortured him for days until he finally could not take it and slit his own throat. Ebony Maw looks practically gleeful at this turn in his vision. “You will give up your life for this, if necessary, won’t you? You don’t need to survive. You’ve never wanted to survive this. And in death, you will be made great by your union with the master’s great vision.” Loki wants to weep but cannot move. The Maw leaves him and he rolls to his side, sick and numb. He does not cry even in solitude, but stares at the wall. He does not sleep.

Each scenario for a week ends in his suicide.

 

“You’re doing very well,” Thanos says. Loki smiles, his face feeling stretched. “The humans will have no defenses against you.”

“Thank you,” Loki says with a bow.

“They will come to see, as all do, the rightness of my plan. Too long has suffering been spread across the galaxy when with the sacrifice of a few, there could be true peace. Don’t you agree, Loki?”

Just as Thanos stops speaking, before Loki can respond, the vision dissolves and he’s lying on his side in his cell, Ebony Maw above him, hand in his hair.

“Good, good,” He says. “That was good.” Loki’s mouth is too dry to speak. He’s given food and water and the next day let out of his cell again, to eat the midday meal in the center of Sanctuary with the others.

And then it all dissolves.

“Stop, _stop this!_ ” He screams as Maw cackles. “I will tell Thanos what you are doing, this isn’t-”

“It _is_. You must be ready, at any moment.” He slaps his hand against the side of Loki’s head and his vision is awash with blue. He emerges from the Tesseract, among the soldiers, and staggers through the plan again.

 

The first time Thor appears, in the wake of thunder and lightning and swirling clouds, Loki loses all sense of where he is and what he is doing, breaks under the weight of months of isolation and torture, and throws his arms around his big brother’s neck-

-and then he is pulled out of the vision in a second, screaming at the pain in his skull as Ebony Maw tears him from it. The Maw’s furious face looms above him.

“How dare you!” Ebony Maw squeezes his skull. “After all we have done for you, all we have given you-”

“Disappointing,” Thanos says from somewhere. Loki cannot see through the pain. “But not unexpected. Give him back to Nebula.”

“No-” Loki chokes and tries to push them away, but it is too late. The Chitauri guards seize him and drag him back to the torture chamber as he kicks and screams and raves against them. They string him up and for the next week Nebula has her fun, takes out her frustrations and insecurities on his body.

The next time he goes into the vision and Thor appears, he takes a knife and slits his brother’s throat and then cries over the body.

The time after that Ebony Maw changes the vision. Thor is the one to torture him, seeking the Tesseract. He doesn’t give in, instead he laughs through the blood coating his teeth.

He is not cured of it completely though, not quite. He still gives in to the impulse sometimes. Thor extends a hand and he takes it. Thor presses him into a wall and asks who sent him and he weeps and clings to him like a child. Ebony Maw is always fast to pull him out, to return him to pain for correction, but there is always a moment, a split second before he does, where Loki lives in the thought that he will be saved. That he will be protected. It’s enough, for a while, but the pain grows too intense and he gives them up. A moment’s hesitation is all he allows himself now.

The plan works, again and again. It fails, again and again. He practices and wins and loses and he starts to wonder what they’re waiting for.

 

One night he is drifting off to sleep in his cell, when he hears an odd sound outside. He sits up at the second sound, like a body falling.

Then Thor appears in the doorway of his cell.

Loki freezes.

“Brother! I have been looking for you for so long.” Thor’s voice is relieved. He breaks open the cell door and rushes forward. Loki is frozen. Thor touches his face, his neck, his sky-blue eyes search his face. “I’ve been looking for you, ever since Mother said you were still alive. I am so sorry I did not find you sooner.”

“This isn’t real,” Loki says slowly.

Thor nods his head frantically. “It is real, brother. Loki, look at me. This is real. I’m right here.” Loki just shakes his head. Thor kisses his forehead and pulls back, to tug him to his feet and into the hall. “Come on. I have a ship, but we must move quickly, Thanos will be back soon.”

Loki stops in his tracks. “No. No, I won’t do this again.”

Thor turns to face him, cupping his neck and running his thumb down his jaw. It feels real but Loki knows deep down it is not. “What are you talking about?”

“I can’t, Thor. I can’t leave.”

“Loki! Stop, I’m here to rescue you, I’m here to take you home.” Thor’s hand is heavy on his neck.

“I have no home,” Loki says, shaking his head desperately. “I have no home.”

“You _do_ ,” Thor presses him against the wall. “We are your family, we are your home, you must come home-”

The knife in Thor’s side silences him, driving the air from his lungs. By the choking noise he makes, Loki thinks he’s pierced a lung.

“I don’t have it,” Loki sobs.

Thor stumbles back, wrenching the knife out. Blood splatters across the stone.

“Loki-”

Loki strikes out with magic, binding Thor’s limbs with magic and driving him to his knees. His face is wet with tears now, and his hands shake as he advances.

“Loki, it’s time for you to come home. You’ll be alright soon, I swear it, I’ll bring you back to Asgard, they’ll heal you, you’ll recover.”

“No. I can’t.”

“You _can_ , brother.”

“I am not your brother.”

“You _are_. Do you not recall, all our years together? Even if you have forgotten, even if you have been…driven _mad_ by this place and forgotten all of our affection, I have not. I will never forget the first time I held you. I will never forget all our days in the sun. This darkness cannot have you. I will not let it-”

“I can’t go home. I can never go home.”

“You _can_ ,” Thor insists. “With me, brother, I can take you home-”     

The knife sinks in just under Thor’s collarbone. He grunts in pain and fights against Loki’s bonds to rear back.

“You’re not really here,” Loki says quietly. “I know that.”

“I am here.” Thor’s eyes are so, so blue. As blue as Frigga’s, as blue as the sky. As blue as his arm had turned that day on Jotunheim. A hateful blue, looking down at him and laughing as he casts him from the bifrost.

“You’re not. You never came for me. I screamed for you to come,” Loki cries through gritted teeth. “And you didn’t. Why didn’t you come?”

“I thought you dead, Loki. I only did not look because I thought there was nothing to look for.” Thor’s eyes are filling with tears. “I mourned you.”

“You _lie!_ You murdered me!” With a horrible cry, Loki withdraws the knife and plunges it in again and again. By the end, Thor’s chest and throat are unrecognizable, torn shreds of flesh and blood, and the light is long gone from his eyes. Loki sobs. He still stabs, though his brother is long dead, his thrusts becoming weaker and weaker as he cries. His spell breaks and Thor’s corpse falls backwards. Loki collapses over his chest, pounding.

“Murderer, you _murdered_ me,” He screams. “I hate you, _I hate you!_ ” The blind rage slowly leaves him as he sobs out all his feeling on his brother’s corpse. The emotions drain away, leaving him empty. He sits up, feeling weak and trembling like a fever’s broken. “Pull me out, Maw. Break the vision.”

Nothing.

Loki blinks. “Break the vision!” Still nothing changes. Horror fills him as he looks down at the corpse. Thor stares up at the ceiling, unseeing. “No, I-” He says quietly. “Oh.”

He thinks he should cry. He should weep and mourn and curse himself for what he has done.

But he doesn’t.

He does nothing.

He just sits, numb, with the corpse for a long time.

And then, after hours and hours, so long that he is _sure_ that it is real this time, the vision breaks. He opens his eyes in his cell.

“He is ready, master.”

“It is time.”

 

The scepter is cold in his hand. It is slowly connecting with the Tesseract, the magic wearing away a hole in the cosmos. A doorway.

Loki stands, bones and flesh whole, magic restored.

“Do not forget,” The Other rasps in his ears. “What will happen in the event of failure. What we will do to your worthless body and soul if the Tesseract is kept from us.” The connection between the two of them pulses, sending a shock of pain through Loki’s head. “I will be watching.”

There’s something else in his head, a brief brush of magic that tastes like his mother’s. But then it is gone, snuffed out under the weight of everything else.

The portal is open and he steps through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for reading until the end! I hope you...well, enjoyed is probably the wrong word. I've been working on this since February. Really happy with how it turned out. This is definitely part of my 'five years late to fandom with Starbucks' series - but I'm enjoying taking on kind of classic tropes/prompts. That's how this started - well, partially for an excuse to write some atmospheric horror, but also then I thought it was a semi-creative way to combine two fandom classics - the all-human AU and the 'what happened on Sanctuary'.
> 
> So that's _a_ version of what I think happened in between Loki letting go in _Thor_ and showing up in _Avengers_. All hurt, no comfort. Oof. I need to go work on some fluffy recovery stuff now. To be real though, I've got a couple other grim WIPs going - an _Endgame_ AU, one pretty angsty post- _Avengers_ sickfic, a post- _Ragnarok_ 'Team Revengers' story about trafficking - all real light stuff. So light. Then I swear, I'm writing fluff, only fluff. 
> 
> Okay, probably not. ;-) 
> 
> Again, thank you for reading this, please comment/like/share/etc and [find me on tumblr at bereft-of-frogs.tumblr.com](https://bereft-of-frogs.tumblr.com/) for writing progress/crying about fictional characters/other assorted shenanigans. :-)


End file.
